Welcome to Pandemic Stories, a living history about the deadliest pandemic outbreak of the last century.
In today’s edition, I speak with a cruise ship crew member who lived out the scramble on the high seas late last month.
If you have a story you want to share, email me at JordanZakarin@gmail.com.
Once J (name withheld to preserve anonymity), a theater technician from Ohio, heard about the perks of working on a cruise ship, she made it a personal goal to get a gig on a major ocean liner.
“Ever since I found out that cruise ships do high-quality productions and will pay you good money to travel the world and house and feed you for free, I knew I had to seize the opportunity,” she told me in an email earlier today.
After working on several productions here on dry land, J had earned the experience and contacts to make her dream a reality. The timing, however, left something to be desired. Her maiden voyage as a theater crew member on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship set sail in January, which meant she was still on her initial three-month contract when COVID-19 began spreading across the globe, killing thousands and sending people retreating indoors. Cruise ships in particular have been a hotbed for the viral pandemic, and J’s experience speaks to the chaos that the outbreak created on the monster ships, which were still scattered worldwide when the scope of the problem became clear.
J described her experience to me over email — all things considered, she’s very much one of the lucky ones. Her emails are stitched together below, with minimal editing for style.
It was very odd, because as we learned more about the virus, life onboard changed very rapidly. At first, the plan was to keep us all on the ship for 30 days without guests, floating ~50 miles off the coast of Florida, docking every 10 days to restock and refuel, and then resume cruises as normal. We even had plans to rotate bringing the ships clear of the virus to one of Royal's private islands so the crew could get off the ship for a day. We were anchored in the water around seven other ships from various companies, just sort of sitting in there. It was extremely eerie.
By the third day, we were told anyone whose contract was ending in the next 30 days was going home on our first turnaround day. By day five, they were asking us to practice social distancing as much as possible onboard and we were told anyone whose contract ends in 90 days is going home. I was one of those people.
Theaters all over the world shut down earlier in March, and while we were in quarantine, we did a performance of one of our production shows for the crew. This meant that for one evening, we were the only people in the world performing a show for an audience in a theater that evening.
By day seven, anyone who was non-essential was leaving on port day unless you requested to stay for safety purposes, but all of our contracts, regardless of how long you had left, were ending on the 25th of March.
So if you did request to stay, you were still under "vacation status" and not working. They also changed their turnaround day rotation from every 10 days to every four days, because the mission was now to get as many crew members off the ship as possible as quickly as possible. This was all subject to change by the hour, as some days we were told the port had limited the number of people getting off to as low as 80 people at a time, some days the restriction was lifted, at one point the captain over the announcements said "What will happen in Ft. Lauderdale? I do not know."
On the first turnaround day, day 10, they had scheduled for somewhere around 200 crew members to leave the ship that morning. Flights were being canceled as quickly as they were being booked, both domestic and international. 90 of the crew members scheduled to get off the ship were kept on. I was lucky enough to get off the ship that day, even though the company didn't have a flight booked for me until nine hours before the ship docked. I kept in contact with many of the people still on the ship.
By the second turnaround day, the story changed again. People who had elected to stay had to get off if they had a flight regardless. Most of my friends got off the ship. There were two left on board that I knew, and at that point, any crew member still on the ship had to be in isolation. That meant one crew member per cabin, and they weren't allowed to leave it at all. Meals were delivered by people in masks to the rooms. Some crew members were put in cabins with no windows where they stayed for four days. Some crew members were moved to guest cabins. There were announcements made to the cabins every day with attempts to update on the situation, but of course, the uncertainty made the announcements nearly useless.
On the third turnaround day, just two days ago, all of my friends got off the ship except one. He's still in isolation, but he was moved to a room with a balcony, so that he has access to outside and sunlight.
None of this is an attempt to shame Royal Caribbean at all. They did an incredible job of getting thousands of crew members from five different brands off the ships, with information changing every day from the company itself all the way to entire countries closing borders. It was just an extremely scary time where all of us wanted to know what was happening next, and no one, not even the Captain, had any real idea.
Also, before you ask, Royal also supplied 30 days of additional pay to anyone who's contract ended early. There was never any fear that we wouldn't be paid. Many people did lose several months of pay, tho, who's contracts weren't supposed to end until May or later. Our contracts are seven months long, and some people had signed on as late as February.
I asked J one last question: Other than the whole pandemic quarantine, did she enjoy the experience of her first cruise job? Her answer:
“Oh! Absolutely! I loved it. I would do it again in an instant.”