8.7

Earlier I had written how I loved the fact that everything on the ship started and stopped perfectly on time. Well leave it to the United States to screw that up. This morning I had to meet with CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) at 530. I drug myself out of bed and went to the the theater where I was given back my passport. They hold your passport while working on board so that if CBP boards the ship they can easily see who is on the vessel. It also prevents us from running away.

I was given my passport and then instructed to disembark and proceed to the CBP checkpoint in the San Juan port. So there we were once again in a big warehouse of a building standing outside the steel gates of border patrol, who were apparently still in bed. The ship's officers were milling around squaking on their radios trying to figure out why there weren't any immigration officers at the checkpoint. After performing my patented sleep/stand routine for about 20 minutes, we were told to board the ship and disembark from a different deck to meet CBP again at 715.

So we re-boarded the ship, hung around for an hour or so, then went back to CBP. This time there I could actually see a few immigration officers, which gave me a little bit of hope. After standing around for another 15 minutes, guests started coming down the escalators and lining up outside of immigration. We were then told that they had to get the guest through first and that we should return at 1015. Awesome. Back onto the ship we go. Long story short we were finally able to go through customs around 1100. I later found out that they typically run sign ons (me) through customs in St. Croix, but because our itinerary was changed due to the weather, we weren't there at the normal day and CBP in San Juan wasn't aware we still needed to meet with them until they were were literally called out of bed.

Last night I completely packed up my room so I can move to another cabin for this week. I was spoiled having so many people help me pack before I left! It was a tight fit but I was able to squeeze everything back into my bag. I'll probably get pretty good at packing everything as I get to do it again in 7 days.

After the immigration shenanigans I moved my things into my new cabin for the week. I'm now in a guest cabin with a BIG WINDOW!! I'm going to get very spoiled sleeping in my big bed and having a stateroom attendant ask if I need anything before I go to bed. It's going to be tough to move back into the bowls of the ship in one week. But I'm enjoying it while I can!

Mid afternoon I went up to the broadcast room to begin heating the camera. We have to warm up the cameras before shooting things outside otherwise as soon as you step outside everything fogs up, gets covered in condensation and it takes like 20 minutes for the camera to be operable. While I was waiting for the camera to warm I met Tim, the traveling broadcast technician. I didn't really realize what he did until I spoke with him, but basically he is one of two people shoreside (Miami) who manage the broadcast division. He oversees all of the new ship builds and installations of the broadcast rooms. He also oversees anytime a ship goes into dry dock and receives equipment upgrades. Essentially he is a big cheese and is on board with us this week to make sure things are operating the way they should be and to report any problems shoreside.

A few minutes after meeting Tim I met Stelian, who will become the head broadcast tech when Kurtis leaves in a week. Stelian has a TON of energy and just wants to fix everything and rewire this and couldn't we do it this way and we can reuse that part for this and let's open up this server and put these parts here. His background is in electrical engineering so he's really into the technical side of the operation. He already showed me enough things to make my head explode.

Tim is trying to clean up the broadcast room and throw out a bunch of old equipment that we don't need anymore. At the same time, Stelian is trying to save all the old equipment because he is convinced we might need it or a part from it later. It's pretty funny to watch Tim lay down the law and say "no, we're never going to use this, it's wasting space, throw it out" and Stelian argue, "but we can salvage the hard drive and put it in this system, blah blah blah!"

So after meeting both of them I pulled out the heated camera, rolled some bars on the tape and then headed to the pool to shoot some footage. When I got to the pool deck I switched the camera on. And nothing happened. I turned it off and back on. Still nothing. I removed and replaced the battery. No luck. So I walked back the broadcast room to inform the others that the camera was not working. Oh, did I mention we only have (had) one working camera? We tried a bunch of different things but nothing worked. It is officially dead. The moist salty environment takes a beating on the cameras and eventually they just die. We were suppose to receive new cameras months ago, but the tsunami in Japan has backordered our order for months and months.

But we had a massive stroke of luck when we received a pre-alert (an e-mail telling your department that something they've ordered is arriving) that there were boxes from Sony on a skid arriving tomorrow in St. Thomas. The cameras were finally here! We just had to wait until our skid was loaded onto the ship tomorrow.