You're about to discover the answers
to eight of the more unusual, curious
and inquisitive questions about cruising.
I'm Gary Bembridge, this is another My Tips for Travellers.
There are eight questions I hear people often ask
on a cruise ship or ask me about cruising.
They really are slightly unusual,
and a little bit on the quirky side.
So I thought I would answer them
right here, right now, starting with this one.
Is there a jail on board a cruise ship?
Well, actually there is.
There's what's known as a brig.
Now if there's some issue,
normally passengers will be restricted to their cabin,
but there is, on most cruise ships, a brig.
This is normally a pretty secure room, nonlinear security,
where they can hold up rowdy passages,
or in fact, I guess, crew
until they get to the next port
and can hand them over to authorities
if something serious has happened.
Now in reality,
one of the big challenges on board cruise ships
is crime and how much crime exists onboard a cruise.
The statistics suggest
crime rates are not particularly high.
However, it's quite difficult to understand
because there's no requirement
and no central registry
because of the way that cruises are run
and where they're registered.
However, one of the ways of looking at crime
is there are eight serious crimes,
which cruise companies have to report
if they're either embarking or disembarking
in the United States.
Of those eight serious crimes,
three of them are the most reported,
that's assaults, sexual assaults
and thefts of large amounts of high value property.
However, it's not really known
how much kind of petty crime exists on board a cruise ship.
There are no police on board
and security will deal with most issues.
So the things you tend to hear about
are the more serious things.
Saying that, in terms of the amount of crime per thousand
or hundreds of thousands of passengers,
it's really low on a cruise,
so when a crime does happen on a cruise ship,
it tends to get a lot of publicity,
but it is kind of hard to get the stats.
But if you do fall foul and you do commit a crime
or cause a disturbance, there is a brig on board,
which you will be thrown into.
The second question that I get asked a lot
and hear asked a lot is,
how many people die on a cruise every year?
Well actually the number's surprisingly small,
around about 200 deaths are recorded on cruise ships.
And bear in mind something like 21 / 22 million people
cruise on cruise ships every year.
It's a pretty small number.
Most of those deaths are related to age,
so dying of old age on board a cruise.
Things to look out for on a cruise is
if you hear over the Tannoy system, over the loudspeakers,
Operation Bright Star,
that means there's a medical issue on board,
some sort of medical emergency on board.
And if you actually hear Operation Rising Star,
that means there has been a death on board.
Of course the cruise lines are not normally likely
going to publicise it, if it happens
because it normally happens kind of discreetly in a cabin
or whatever.
So what do they do with the bodies?
Well actually cruise ships do have a morgue
and have to carry body bags and normally,
the body is put in a body bag,
it'll be stored in the morgue.
Now what happens to that body,
depends a little bit on the port.
Some ports will want the body to be disembarked,
I guess sometimes the family will want the body disembarked.
In other cases, the body will stay on board
until the ship gets back to the port it started in,
because that just makes it much easier for the cruise line
and often for the family to deal with.
The third question is,
is it a ship or is it a boat?
A lot of people on cruises go crazy
when people call a cruise ship a cruise boat.
So what is the right terminology?
Well, in the whole military area
and all the maritime worlds,
one of the rules that people use is
you can put a boat on a ship
but you can't put a ship on a boat.
So if you look at cruise ships,
they actually have boats on them,
they have lifeboats on them,
so that does make them a ship.
So it's kind of an informal thing.
Another point of view is,
anything over 20 metres i.e over 60 feet,
is considered a ship.
So actually, for example, in river cruising for a long time,
they were called river boats
because they were shorter than 60 feet long.
However, the general view is that
anything that's over that size is a ship.
So as in in the military world, anything over that size
is likely to be called a ship.
In practise, there's no right or wrong.
However, people who are into cruising
will tend to call it a ship and not a boat.
You'll even find some cruise captains,
believe so strongly in it.
So I have been on cruises,
for example, on Celebrity Cruises,
where Captain Kate is renowned for a badge that she wears,
which says it's a ship, not a boat.
The next question I hear a lot
and it's actually one thing I wondered about for a long time
is why is the safety drill called a Muster Drill?
It's quite hard to find out the reason for that,
but it seems to be it's always been called that
and it comes from the word muster,
which means to gather, and it's just stuck.
It's become one of those terms for the safety drill.
Very important, of course,
the safety drill has to be done
within 24 hours of passengers embarking.
Since Costa Concordia that's become even stricter.
And now cruise lines do that
before the ship actually sets sail.
The fifth question is,
if you've ever looked at a daily programme,
you'll see there's a couple of people have lots of friends.
So, Bill and Dorothy, for example, have lots of friends.
So the question you could ask is,
why on earth do Bill W., Dorothy and Jimmy
have so many friends
that they actually have a meetup?
Well Friends of Bill W.,
was the one that really kicked it all off,
and it's because cruise lines
originally, didn't want to say
that they were hosting Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Bill W. refers to William or Bill W. Wilson,
who was one of the co-founders of the AA.
Dorothy was the codename, way back when,
for the LGBT community.
You'll find nowadays, that very few cruise lines
talk about Friends of Dorothy meetings,
and they will just call them LGBT meetups.
Nowadays, it's the Dorothy slang word
has kind of disappeared and people just call it LGBT.
The other one that you may see,
although it's much less common is Friends of Jimmy.
And Friends of Jimmy K. refers to the NA
or Narcotics Anonymous, which was founded by James Kinnon.
Most cruise lines though,
will tend to direct people looking for an NA meeting,
or Friends of Jimmy K. to the Friends of Bill W. meeting.
So that's why Bill, Jimmy and Dorothy have so many friends
and meetups on board the ship.
Another question that I hear a lot is,
is it salt water in the toilets?
Of course, no one's going to get close enough
to actually find out and test for themselves.
Well, actually, originally,
it was salt water in the toilets.
That's before desalination plants
and when they were really expensive and were just prohibitive.
So salt water was actually used both in the showers
and also in the toilets.
That created a lot of problems because, of course,
rust and all sorts of problems in the actual equipment,
but it was originally salt water,
today, it's not salt water.
The next question is,
where does all this clean pure non salted water come from?
There's actually three places
that it can come from on a cruise ship.
The first, and the most traditional of all,
is what's known as bunkering.
Bunkering is the maritime term
for loading water onboard a ship and of course,
if water is bunkered on a cruise ship,
it's tested on board to make sure it's all safe to drink.
However, nowadays cruise ships will tend to
make their own water.
And two ways of doing that,
the first of the processes
that cruise ships use themselves on board
is known as steam evaporation.
So this is where the cruise ship uses the heat,
the huge amount of heat that's generated by the engines.
They take salt water, they heat it up,
it evaporates, the water evaporates,
all the salts and stuff is left behind,
they then turn the steam back into water
through condensation and they have water
that they can then treat and use.
The other process which is the most common process
is known as reverse osmosis.
So what happens here is salt water is taken on board,
and is basically pushed through
a microscopic screen, which then keeps all the salts
and the stuff like that behind,
and only the fresh clean water goes through,
of course the water is then treated
and made sure that it's safe to drink and consume.
So those are the three key ways that the ship gets water
that people can drink and use on board.
So water is perfectly safe to drink on board,
it's processed and treated extremely thoroughly
before it's sent through the ship for consumption and use.
The next question is around waste.
Now clearly, on ships of several thousand people,
an enormous amount of waste is going to be generated
both human waste and rubbish waste.
So what actually happens to all of that waste?
Let's talk, first of all, about sewage.
By international law, ocean going vessels
are actually able to put sewage in the sea
once they're 12 miles out from land
and they're going a certain speed.
However, cruise ships are however not allowed to do it.
So all cruise liners which are part of the CLIA,
the Cruise Line Association,
abide by policy which says that no untreated sewage
will be put into the sea anywhere in the world at any time.
So what happens?
Well, it's treated on board.
First of all, they take black water,
which is basically human waste,
and they take grey water,
so that's water that's come out of
things like the kitchens or the basins or the showers.
Those two waters are combined in certain ratios,
they're then treated by
normally sort of bacterial treatment,
which purifies it.
It then goes through another process,
and they use UV to really treat the water
rather than chlorine or chemicals
because ultimately the water, once it's treated,
and it is back to being completely safe
and free of impurities, it is released,
normally, back into the ocean.
When it comes to food waste,
all the food waste is collected
and it goes through these grinders
and turn basically into a runny mixture,
which then is normally also able
to then be released into the sea.
Sometimes, of course, it is then pumped in on land.
When it comes to other items, there's also a whole process.
What's important to know is,
cruise ships have an Environmental Officer on board
who is in charge of all of these various operations.
So when it comes to waste, your cabin steward, for example,
will sort through all of your waste
and sort it into plastics, into metals, into paper.
All of the glass collected on board,
is sorted by colour, it's ground down,
and then is disembarked because it's sold off
as waste that can be recycled on land.
Paper is sorted out, it's all bundled up
and again that's handed over and sold for recycling
and the same is done separately for cardboard
and of course for things like metal cans,
which are all crushed down.
So there's a huge big operation.
One of the things I would encourage you to do
if you're ever on a cruise ship
that offers a full behind-the-scenes tour,
which you'll often have to pay for,
but it will take you right
and down into the depths of the ship
and you get to meet the Environmental Officer
and you get to see the whole process in place,
and it's really, really interesting
to see how they take the waste,
both human waste and the grey water,
and paper and glass and cans.
And it's really good to see first-hand
how it's all dealt with.
So there's a whole big recycling operation
that takes place on board cruise ships.
Those are the answers to eight
of the most probing, unusual and slightly quirky questions
that I hear about cruising.
Hope you found that helpful,
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