So we have a question from Dennis, he wants to know about dressing
appropriately for warm ship with potentially cold outside decks, does one
layer? Is there any umbrella protocol? This is a fantastic question one that we
had top of mind for months leading up to this. How do I pack and how do I dress?
And so now having done it I think I have some solid advice so yes one does layer
but that means something very specific because people always said Oh layer
layer I maybe it's my inexperience but I wasn't sure what that meant because that
could mean thermal underwear long pants long sleeve shirts sweater jacket etc
etc and it's not exactly like that the kind of layering you want to do is the
kind of layering that you can peel off quickly because you will experience
temperature fluctuations throughout the trip even from moment to moment where
like I was perpetually wondering if I was running a fever because the last
time I had felt such rapid temperature fluctuations was when I was unwell and
so not the thermal underwear I don't recommend that I don't recommend a scarf
I don't think that's worthwhile but having a regular t-shirt a sort of a zip
up fleece thing it's a full zip so you can unzip it in an instant and then
maybe a serious jacket on top of that something that's maybe weatherproof I
made do with my leather jacket and a hood but if you have like gore-tex
whatever and then just you know constantly be adjusting and a toque is a
very good idea because you do experience high winds and so if you want to cover
your head the hood will get blown right off and it won't work very well whereas
the toque if it's you know if it's a good fit
it'll be snug to your head and you can also put other things on top of that so
yeah it can go from very warm to very cold very rapidly oddly though the Husky
hat wound up being rather practical because it has these little balls at the
ends it's got this ear flap thing right and they have these little poms at the end
and you can actually tie them up together so it actually was a
really good wind buffer because I have my ears covered and I was able to kind
of duck into the into the wind quite well but yeah definitely what Ray says
and some gloves if you want some if you want to use your phone and take
photos and whatnot so you'll want something that's a touch screen friendly gloves the
ones I had were useless to get you know invest in some more better than you know
one size fits all sort of stuff I actually got a bit of a sunburn
in Skagway because it got super-crazy hot and sunny and I had packed shorts just
wishful thinking and there's a number times in Skagway we were sitting on the Serenity deck
I was like I wonder if I should actually go change into these and
there were people that were walking around that day in shorts on serenity and
whatnot so yeah it'd be kind of prepared for all eventualities we were really
fortunate we didn't really have much in the way of rain so the umbrella
protocol was not really something that we encountered and when it did rain it
wasn't something super serious that an umbrella was really needed most people just kind of
wore like a so yeah you know your outer layer just having a waterproof jacket
and you should be covered and yeah and honestly even when it was raining I
didn't see umbrellas on the ship at all partly because there's a wind factor
yeah and on lido you can still there's a lot of windows you can see out of and
if you have an ocean view cabin like we do or a balcony cabin or you know other
parts of the ship again deck two things like that there's a lot of window
opportunities from the inside of the ship that you don't need to go outside
in pouring rain for so no one at any point opened an umbrella on the ship
that I saw at all because they would just basically either don't have a hood
and they'll just you know fortify through it or they'll go run indoors
those were sort of what people were doing so yeah there's I would say
do bring an umbrella particularly if they end up in the port and it ends up
raining there but don't expect to be using it on the ship at all I don't
think it would be practical because yeah there would also be crowds and wind and things like that
yeah I mean there was a, I know there were a number of times we were tacking into 50-plus mile
an hour winds there's no way you're going to hold onto umbrella and like
there were there were people that fell down from wind because it was very
intense and there was a couple times where I myself who at you know 270 pounds was
struggling to stay upright in the wind because it got pretty it was fun but it
was it was really intense I was knocked back a
step by the wind a couple times myself so it's a it's really quite
striking