big numbers and big ships

Many months ago I read several articles about the launch of the largest passenger ship in the world - Royal Caribbeans "Oasis of the Seas". After she began sailing, I looked up her cruise schedule and was excited to see that she would be in the Bahamas at the same time as the Logos Hope.

This morning, a few hours after we arrived in Nassau, this monster of a ship sailed in behind us to take up one of the multiple berths here in this port.





Despite visiting ports all over the Caribbean for the past 8 months, we have never seen anything like the spectacle of 5 other huge cruise ships lined up one after another next to us like we have today.



Of course these ships normally arrive in port and pour out thousands of their passengers into the surrounding area. Quite the opposite of what often happens with the Logos Hope. We see thousands of people coming onboard our ship from the port.

Last weekend, after moving berth in Kingston we were just overwhelmed by the number of visitors. On Saturday we opened the gate at 10.00 am and in less than an hour, we already had to stop the line due to the numbers on the deck. By 7.30 we had to stop anyone else joining the end of the line because we had such a queue. We had a total of 7140 visitors on Saturday.

Sunday was always going to be the biggest challenge because so many people come in a relatively short time between 2 and 6 pm. We opened the gate an hour and half early and by our official opening time of 2pm had already seen over a thousand people come onboard.

By 6pm on Sunday afternoon, we had such a long line, around 1200 people outside the gate and another 300 inside, that we needed to call out the ships control team to manage the crowd.
We put ships personnel in place every 10 - 15m along the line to stop people queue jumping and then at 7.00 I shut the line.
It was well after 9pm before the last people were on the ship, with another 6357 visitors.

By the time we said goodbye to the last visitor on Monday night, we had welcomed over 135,000 people onboard in Kingston and over 220,000 altogether in Jamaica. No wonder we all feel so tired.
Thankfully we had a few days at sea this week to recover a bit.

On Tuesday, I hand over responsibility for my division to my replacement, so I have only 2 jobs to do for my final 9 weeks onboard instead of 3.