8.6

This morning was more training!! I think I'm almost done with these morning classes. Today we started by discussing crowd management. Basically different ways to control and manage a large crowd under both normal and emergency situations. It was pretty interesting and will not only be useful on the ship, as some info was very specific to maritime situations, but a lot of it was just how to manage crowds no matter where they're located. After that was over we went down to the hospital to receive some basic first aid training.
It was pretty amazing to see the medical facility. It's much more substantial than I imagined. Did you know they have a mortuary on the ship? I realized I walk by it probably 20 times a day and just noticed it today. One of the doctors walked us through different medical scenarios that we might run into on the ship or anywhere really. Then Rescue Annie came out for CPR lessons. I had to do 100 chest compressions in 1 minute. It's a pretty good workout! The doctor showed us how to help a choking infant and many other things I didn't know how to do properly.

After we finished in the hospital we met back up with the chief safety officer who took us to the disembarking deck (5) to show us around inside a lifeboat. We climbed inside as it hung over the port side of the ship. He showed us all the different medical, safety, mechanical and food ration systems on the craft. Each boat holds 139 guests and 11 crew. They have 1,000 sea sick tablets on the boat and each person is required to take one as soon as they board and then can take up to 5 afterwards. No one is allowed to eat the emergency food for the first 24 hours and are each provided with 3L of water which gets rationed in these space aged packs. The Coast Guard can ask any crew member certain questions about the lifeboats that they must know the answer to. How many flares are in each lifeboat? "6 hand held, 4 parachute and 2 smoke flares Officer Sanchez." We were also bunkering fuel on the port side so I got to see how that process was working as we stood on the outside of the ship.

I'm sitting at a bar beach side in St. Martin as I upload these entries. I might be able to get used to this view...