Friday 20th & Saturday 21st January
Ritual humiliation of some of the crew members, including the captain.
Our previous cruise aboard Black Watch crossed the Arctic Circle, and we remember a similar ceremony on that occasion as being a little too long. It was concluded though with a very nice display of ice carving. A few miles north of the Equator though, ice carving on deck wasn't an option.
The Captain, Henrik Mattson, was the first to be judged by King Neptune and forced to kiss the (raw) fish, before several young lady members of the crew attempted to push him into the pool. Being fairly sturdy though, and probably weighing twice as much as any of the girls Captain Mattson put up a bit of a struggle and when eventually faced with overwhelming odds, decided he would at least take two of the girls in with him.
Many other crew members were similarly humiliated, finishing with Sophie, the only young lady who had to kiss the fish!
The ceremony was somewhat premature though; the actual equator crossing didn't happen until nearly 07:00 the next morning. Understandably though, the entertainments director didn't think many passengers would attend that early.
In fact, there were remarkably few passengers on deck when we crossed the Equator, and still fewer who knew exactly when we did cross it. I was very lucky to happen to chat to another passenger, who assured me that we hadn't crossed the Equator as predicted by the captain at 06:30.
He suggested that we were actually still several minutes away and went to get his tablet PC to show me. As we watched, the numbers counted down until at 06:56 approximately, Black Watch passed from the northern hemisphere to the southern.
This is me trying to point exactly east and west along the equator, south behind me:
I was afterwards able to tell the lady in the exercise pool that she had just swum across the Equator - she was understandably pleased to know that.
Ritual humiliation of some of the crew members, including the captain.
Our previous cruise aboard Black Watch crossed the Arctic Circle, and we remember a similar ceremony on that occasion as being a little too long. It was concluded though with a very nice display of ice carving. A few miles north of the Equator though, ice carving on deck wasn't an option.
The Captain, Henrik Mattson, was the first to be judged by King Neptune and forced to kiss the (raw) fish, before several young lady members of the crew attempted to push him into the pool. Being fairly sturdy though, and probably weighing twice as much as any of the girls Captain Mattson put up a bit of a struggle and when eventually faced with overwhelming odds, decided he would at least take two of the girls in with him.
Many other crew members were similarly humiliated, finishing with Sophie, the only young lady who had to kiss the fish!
The ceremony was somewhat premature though; the actual equator crossing didn't happen until nearly 07:00 the next morning. Understandably though, the entertainments director didn't think many passengers would attend that early.
In fact, there were remarkably few passengers on deck when we crossed the Equator, and still fewer who knew exactly when we did cross it. I was very lucky to happen to chat to another passenger, who assured me that we hadn't crossed the Equator as predicted by the captain at 06:30.
He suggested that we were actually still several minutes away and went to get his tablet PC to show me. As we watched, the numbers counted down until at 06:56 approximately, Black Watch passed from the northern hemisphere to the southern.
This is me trying to point exactly east and west along the equator, south behind me:
I was afterwards able to tell the lady in the exercise pool that she had just swum across the Equator - she was understandably pleased to know that.
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