The Bridge

Today I went on a tour of the bridge. The deadline to sign up was a couple days ago and it was filled to capacity. Even though I didn’t sign up I just acted like I was supposed to be there and no one seemed to care. Luis gave us a tour of all the communication and navigation instruments. It was very interesting, the ship has many radios and most are redundant. I asked Luis what has changed since the ship experienced bad weather in 2005. All the instruments have been replaced and they have all new windows, but really nothing has changed. There are controls for all the waterproof doors and fire doors that are controlled by the bridge, and the master override for the ships PA system was in there too. Lauren Barto asked if we could say happy birthday to Sean Woods, but Luis told us that he can only use the pa to announce the captains birthday. The tour was interrupted when someone else on the bridge saw another group of baby dolphins off the starboard side, it was neat to see all the little dolphins jumping. One of the other people on the tour asked what the procedure is for pirates and we learned the ship unfortunately has no weapons. Luis explained that when necessary the ship can hire a private security team with weapons, but they currently do not have one. He told us a story about last spring semester when the Explorer encountered pirates between Spain and Singapore. Luis happened to be on duty and noticed a group of ships heading directly towards the Explorer, they did not respond to radio calls and he could see the people on board were making distress signals with their arms. For this voyage because we are sailing with Desmond Tutu the ship has unarmed security on multiple decks that can use the firehouses to knock boats or people away. The primary method of defense for this ship is actually speed. The ship travels at 29.5 knots maximum and this is faster than most other vessels on the water. More sophisticated pirates will use more than one boat with a large rope connecting them, when a larger ships travels into the rope the smaller boats will become attached to the larger ships sides. In the case last spring the captain decided not to risk it and did an emergency start of all 4 engines to escape at a higher speed. Typically only one engine is in use and the boat travels around 12 knots. 2 Days til spain.