Alistair Baillie

Well greetings from sunny, warm Warsash Maritime Academy (hence forth called WMA) on the banks of the Solent. We all arrived on Sunday afternoon and checked into our rooms. The other Island Cruises guys and I drove into Southampton and went to a Chinese buffet for dinner, before heading back to WMA. Its quite good in that all the Viking cadets have pretty much entire section to ourselves (except for the 2 girls who are upstairs somewhere).

Monday was spent doing not a lot, we were all up for breakfast at 0730, and gathered outside for morning muster at 0830. After that the warden took us to one of the lecture theatres where we were given a welcome talk by one of the principle lecturers and then we were told where to go next.

After a brief 20 minute break we all headed off to find the classroom we were supposed to go to. Once there we were introduced to our course principle lecturer, talked to about the course, told what our groups would be for the ‘STCW95 short courses’ (that’s Basic Fire Fighting, Emergency First Aid, Personal & Social Responsibilities and Personal Survival Techniques) for those not aware.

I’m in group 3 along with all the other Viking Recruitment cadets (Island Cruises & Holland America Line are both covered by Viking).

Monday night was rather boring, I spent most of it in one of the Holland America Line cadets room looking at photos one of them had taken when she worked on cruise ships, and then joined by the other island and Holland America people till around 2300. Not such a good idea when you’re up at 0645 the next morning!

Tuesday again was rather boring, we were up for muster at 0830 then went off to a lecture about cargo. This week all our lectures are just introductions to the shipping industry and we don’t need to remember any of it yet. After the two lectures we went for lunch then it was the entry maths exam. I hope I did alright cause it didn’t seem that hard. After which we went for dinner then met up with all the Viking cadets in the student bar for the quiz night. The team I was in did not very well but we weren’t last, the other two Viking teams did considerably better making the top 10.

Today we were up as usual for the 0830 muster, and then went to a lecture at 0900 on the Shipboard Working Environment where we were told all about stuff like SOLAS and what they are. We then had an unexpected lecture on Dry Cargo (not very interesting to us cruise ship people – but we still need to know it), followed this afternoon by a lecture in engineering (again – not very interesting to us deck cadets but we need to at least know what an engineer does).

I’ve also uploaded a few photo’s of Warsash in my Photo’s section, and I’ll add more when I take them.