Day 37--Enroute to Capetown

29 September. 13° 18”S, 08° 17” E. Course = 156°. Speed = 14 knots

The sea swells are definitely larger today than they have been since the second day out of Halifax—maybe even higher. The captain, a Brit with 35 years at sea—someone who runs a very, very tight ship—told Nick Immarino, our executive dean, that we may be in for “a bit of a bumpy ride” over the next few days. A storm is brewing off the SW African coast, and we’re heading into it. If it moves out to sea quickly—we’re in the southern hemisphere, where low-pressure storms rotate clockwise and move from east to west—we may skirt its edges. If it moves slowly, the ride could, indeed, get “bumpy.”

So far, the seas have been very calm for almost the entire voyage. We had a few 8’- to 10’-foot swells in the northwest Atlantic that were moving directly across the ship—port to starboard—and causing 10° to 15° rolls, enough to cause books to fall off shelves and coffee cups to slide across tables. The swells today are definitely larger, but they’re coming more closely to head-on, or bow-on, so the roll isn’t quite as dramatic . . . yet. The curtains sway in and out, my shaving cream is rolling back and forth on the bathroom shelf, and voyagers are holding onto the stair railings a little more tightly. So far, though, most sea legs are holding up.

As I said, Captain Jeremy runs a tight ship. And it’s a ship that seems constantly to be undergoing cleaning and repair. After coming from Ghana, where preventive maintenance is a foreign concept, the constancy of work on the MV Explorer is a wondrous thing to behold. Deckhands seem to be everywhere at almost all times. At 5am, if I’m unfortunate enough to be awake, I hear them swabbing the deck above my cabin and see the water cascading down my window into the ocean. When I’m eating on the 5th deck aft, a deckhand is there scrubbing part of the area, or scraping chips away from the metal lining under the rails, or varnishing the wood tops of the handholds. As I walk through the ship, I pass crewmembers wiping down and sanitizing the stair rails, or vacuuming and polishing the common areas, or rearranging into symmetrical, identical clusters the tables and chairs students and faculty have moved around to get better WiFi reception or to huddle on some interesting topic. I think we’re staffed by 200 compulsive personalities . . . or maybe just one compulsive captain. But no one on board has anything but praise for the tidiness of the ship.

That tidiness was disrupted on Saturday, Neptune Day. Neptune Day is a traditional celebration onboard any ship crossing the equator, celebrated, I’m sure, more exuberantly on some ships than on others. On the Explorer, it’s exuberant.

The idea is to initiate into the fraternity of “shellbacks” those who have never before crossed the equator on the sea; before the initiation, we’re mere “pollywogs.” The initiation on the ship started at 0800 (8am) with a parade through the ship’s narrow halls of King Neptune’s honor guard, all dressed in togas, wearing aluminum-foil helmets, carrying spears and tritons, and banging on cymbals and garbage-can lids to make sure all pollywogs were awake and ready to greet the king.

At 0900, we were summoned to the 7th-deck pool area, where King Neptune (Captain Jeremy, costumed in fish-scale loincloth, wearing a gold crown, and sporting a bright-green complexion) and Queen Minerva (Asst. Dean Rita, also green and decked out in queenly robes) entered from below and paraded to their thrones at one end of the pool. Then all pollywogs lined up for the initiation ritual.

The ritual begins with an anointment of green or red slop, about the consistency of uncongealed jello, mixed up in the kitchen and dished onto pollywog heads by two members of Neptune’s retinue. The anointed pollywog then leaps into the pool, rinses off, climbs out, and is greeted by another member of the court holding a fish. A kiss on the fish’s moist lips entitles the baptized pollywog to be dubbed an official “shellback.” Dean Bob Chapel, in toga, did the dubbing. The final step is to kiss the rings of King Neptune and Queen Minerva. To seal the deal, several of the new shellbacks also have their heads shaved—we now have about 100 students, faculty, and staff onboard in various degrees of baldness, from Mohawks to hemispheres to the full monty.

I stood on the sides and took pictures. I rationalized that I had gone through a fraternity initiation 40-or-so years ago that more than covered me for any future ritual. Besides, I had a mild touch of Kunte Kinte’s revenge from Ghana. And the weather was drizzly and cool, at least cool for the equator. So I stayed dry and well entertained. Pictures will be on Facebook.

The swells are getting bigger. And I just saw a humpback leap out of the water (really!) as if to say, “batten the hatches.”