All We Need to Know …

All we need to know for zodiac operations — and God forbid, in the event of an emergency — is on the keycards we received yesterday when we embarked Ultramarine.

Muster Station ✔️ … Station A is in the Balena Restaurant.

Lifeboat ✔️ … we went out on deck during the muster drill and know where to find boat #1.

Ready Room Locker ✔️ … Station B is to the left of the staircase and elevators; cubby 11 is where my muck boots and zodiac pfd (personal flotation device … i.e. life jacket) are located.

Zodiac Group ✔️ … the blue dot correlates with “Fram,” the name of the group to which we’ve been assigned.

Gone, by the way, are the old methods used to advise the expedition team if you are onshore or on the ship. No more turning of number tags (with one side reading “off”) as we did on Professor Molchanov in 2007. No more paper manifest to check our assigned passenger number as we did on 50 Let Pobedy in 2014. No more fumbling around, looking for keycards in the many pockets of the parka. Now, we simply slip our keycard into a handy pocket on the sleeve of the parka and let the crewman scan us off and on the ship as we head to/from the marina deck.

Time to go for a zodiac landing … a wet one that will see us slipping off the zodiac and into the water when we get to the landing beach. We’ve been trained. We know what to do.Read more