Alistair Baillie

Ive been at home for just over a month now and just got my flight details this morning. I will be flying out to join the Island Star in Palma de Mallorca (Balearic Islands) on Saturday morning, where the plan is to sail around for a week, then head to Marseille (South coast of France) to pick up passengers before heading out of the Mediterranean and across the North Atlantic to the Caribbean, where we will sail out of Barbados every two weeks.

This is (hopefully) my final trip as a cadet before I go up for my orals examination some time around June 2009 and I still have quite a bit to learn – although I am getting there.

This was also to be Island Cruises first time in the Caribbean and unfortunately its also their last, with the Island Star returning to one of the other Royal Caribbean brands at the end of March (see the press release on Island Cruises web site if you are interested), I am assuming this will be when the cadets leave and fly home – but you never know!

This time I shall try and record some interesting videos of the workings of the ship (or at least photos), including a tour of the engine room and other random events that passengers don’t get to see.

I was hoping to be experiencing a dry dock during my first week onboard, but that appears to have been cancelled, but we shall see what happens.

Also for the past 4 weeks there has been a weekly 30 minute documentary on STV (presumably to be repeated on the ITV network at some point this/next year) called The Merchant Navy which follows some cadets from Mearsk, BP & Carnival through their training. If you don’t live in Scotland you can watch it on the STV Catchup web site here.