When Cruising Around The World Is Just Part Of The Job

Thousands of young people go to sea these days as crew members aboard the more than 250 cruise liners plying the seven seas. Come aboard the Royal Viking Sun and find out why many of them keep on sailing and sailing and sailing.

ABOARD THE ROYAL VIKING SUN - Like those singing sailors in the old MGM musical, young people today join cruise ships to see the world.

And what do they see? They see the sea.

More than that, they see an awful lot of the galley, the dining room or long corridors of cabins waiting to be cleaned. Sometimes that view seems endless: 10 or more hours a day, seven days a week, interrupted now and then by a free morning or afternoon in port.

"OK, you don't see the world, but you get a taste of everything," said stewardess Anki Lektord, as the Cunard liner Royal Viking Sun cleared the breakwater in the South Pacific port of Pago Pago, bound out for Fiji.

The crew members got a taste of something they didn't expect a few weeks later. The Royal Viking Sun, on an around-the-world voyage expected to end in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on April 29, struck a reef and began taking on water in the northern Red Sea on April 4.

The ship was towed to port in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt. No one was injured.

Anki, 28, from Vaxjo, Sweden, joined the ship six months ago. Her first job at sea entails making up 10 cabins twice a day. "Seeing different places is exciting," she agreed, "but this is not something I want to do all my life. Maybe one more contract."

Which is what a lot of the crew keeps telling themselves 10, 15 years later.

"Old hands tell you seven years at sea and you're hooked," mused deck steward Mariano Zuniga from Manila, who shipped out eight years ago to save money to study architectural engineering. "I'm 29 now, too old for such dreams. The sea is my university."

"Travel is the compensation for long hours, lack of privacy in cramped quarters and intense effort and sacrifice," said crew steward Tom OpdeBeeck of Brugge, Belgium. "We try to get everyone ashore for a few hours in every port."

OpdeBeeck is the officer in charge of morale and discipline below decks - the quarters for most of the 427 crew members who attend the 780 passengers and keep the 38,000-ton ship shipshape.

A combination local sheriff and camp counselor, he sees that their quarters are kept tidy and their off-duty hours are brightened with sports, parties, dances and, wherever possible, low-cost crew outings. On this voyage he arranged scuba diving in Fiji, horseback riding on an Australian cattle ranch, and exploring the Great Barrier Reef in a chartered sailboat.

Thousands of young people go to sea these days as waiters, dishwashers, cabin stewards, hairdressers, deckhands, even slot machine mechanics, on the more than 250 cruise ships that ply the seven seas, including the Antarctic Ocean. They come from every nationality and every strata of society.

In the age of the Concorde and the jumbo jet, the siren song of the sea is as beguiling as it was when Herman Melville, Jack London, Jozef Teodor Korzeniowski, later known as Joseph Conrad, and ship surgeon Arthur Conan Doyle signed on for their first hitch.

"They like to see the world and they like to make money," said Capt. Ola Harsheim, a Norwegian who went to sea at 15 for the same reasons as most of his crew left their homes in 32 different countries. "At sea is where the jobs are."

More ships coming

Though presently in a bit of a slump, the $12.7 billion cruise market as a whole is one of the few growth industries in a sluggish global economy. For the American trade alone, 27 new ships are under construction, some of them floating resorts carrying 2,500 passengers.

P&O has just put in service its new flagship, the 69,000-ton Oriana, built at a cost of $435 million. Carnival Cruises with nine ships carries a million passengers a year.

In the next five years the cruise industry is expected to add 40,000 more employees, doing jobs that would have shivered the timbers of old salts Melville and Conrad: disc jockey, casino dealer, concierge, bridge expert (not navigation, but duplicate and contract), linen keeper, masseuse, governess, golf pro.

Dozens of employment agencies around the globe recruit for the burgeoning cruise trade: CSCS Human Resources of Miami and Monaco, International Services in Paris, CND Cruise Services in Hamburg, Germany, Apollo Ship Chandlers in Miami, Casino Austria, which operates 90 casinos at sea, Astra Ltd. of Poland.

Like well-heeled passengers, experienced hands seek out luxury ships with exotic itineraries. Recruiters stress that disregarding the hours worked - and without figuring in free room and board - pay at sea is generally higher than for the same job ashore.

Work hard, play hard

"The pay, with tips, is better than I would make in the best restaurant in Lisbon," agreed 23-year-old dining room waiter Nilton Diaz, now on his third ship since leaving his native Portugal two years ago.

"I'm on duty 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with six months on and six weeks off between contracts. It's hard work, serving 20 people at a meal, but my main interest is satisfied: seeing the four corners of the earth."

Tips for hairdressers at sea compare with "a posh Mayfair salon," said Michelle Kelchy from Liverpool, England, who manages the beauty parlor aboard and has worked on 40 ships in the past six years."

Manfred Jaud, the 36-year-old chef de cuisine, worries that one day soon there might not be enough applicants to fill the 42 chef positions in his galley.

"Young people don't want to be chefs anymore," he says. "This is a job you live for: 10 hours a day for six months without a day off. You don't find that kind of dedication anymore."

Except for oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau, lecturing during the cruise, Jaud may be the only one on board who actually came to see the sea.

"I'm from a small village in the Austrian Alps," he explained, while sampling with a tiny spoon every dish on the dinner menu. "When you come from the mountains, you always want the opposite. I never thought I would be 14 years at sea."

His importance to the Royal Viking Sun, which maintained its rating as the world's top cruise ship in the 1996 Berlitz Guide to Cruising, was affirmed when Capt. Harsheim delayed leaving a Caribbean port because his head chef, off sightseeing, forgot to advance his watch an hour.

Missing the boat can be a firing offense. Those signing aboard for the first time soon learn the rules: no pets or plants in your cabin, no smoking or chewing gum on the job, no fishing from the decks, no trespassing in passenger areas except in the line of duty, when a smile is obligatory.

Drug possession is worse than a firing offense: The culprit is put ashore at the next port, even where the death penalty is mandatory. Drunk on duty, surliness to any authority figure, unkempt uniform and similar offenses bring a written warning. Three warnings and you're out.

Several application forms warn that "long hair, beards, earrings, gaudy makeup, exaggerated sideburns and mustaches are not permitted."

"It was that way when I worked for Sitmar Lines," recalled waiter Giovanni Tortella, who is from Verona but sports a flamboyant Sicilian mustache that seems made to order for the Royal Viking Sun's new Venezia restaurant.

In 16 years at sea, Tortella has been around the world six times. "I prefer ships with strict discipline," he says. "Everything is better when everyone is sober and doing his job. So what if the passengers are always right?"

When passengers do wrong

Sometimes, these days, the passenger is wrong. Paul Kaminski, from Danbury, Conn., who manages the ship's TV station, related the crew's favorite happening: "An obnoxious passenger threw a steak at a waiter and cursed him out. The waiter threw it back at him. That waiter is still in the dining room. The passenger was invited not to return."

"This is no longer the age of Capt. Bligh," said manager Peter Einfeld from Holland, who supervises a staff of more than 350 in the catering department. "In rare passenger-crew confrontations, the crew member gets a fair hearing. Otherwise we would never have our proud record of retaining 85 percent of our staff, cruise after cruise."

Life is a "lot easier than when I came to sea 20 years ago," mused Einfeld. "All crew cabins are air-conditioned with a toilet and shower. Stewards make up all crew cabins. The crew has satellite TV, a bar with reasonable prices, a computer learning center, hot food at any hour."

But some sign on because the crowded lifestyle and strict regimen help bury their past at sea: a busted romance, a bitter divorce, failure at school or business, a brush with the law.

"The ocean is deeper than most problems," the Rev. Joseph Topping, the ship's Catholic chaplain, counsels them.

The secret life below decks is so unobtrusive that one day staff Capt. Birger Vorland, on his daily inspection rounds, was asked by a little old lady on the shuffleboard court, "Does the crew live on board?"

A latter-day Dante would be fascinated by their underworld:

Way below the waterline on Deck Two, 10 Chinese laundry workers wash, iron or dry-clean a ton of passenger and ship laundry a day.

"They have their own galley," reported Lynda Ragsdale from Alton, Ill., who edits "Skald," the ship's daily program. "It's an honor for any of us to be invited to one of their yummy dinners."

Out on the rope deck, Richard Leney, a member of the ship's jazz quartet, was practicing his trumpet. All about him dozens of shipmates took sun baths or plunged into the crew pool. Leney, a graduate physicist from Norwich, England, became "disenchanted with physics and drifted into the London music scene, doing one-night gigs in pubs. Then I saw this ad for a Greek ship looking for jazz musicians. That was three ships ago."

In "Bogey Plaza,' the crew lounge, Tian Jiang, a world-class pianist performing on board, was playing pingpong with a German pastry chef, thoroughly ignored by the chess players at surrounding tables.

Almost every night in the disco-bar, different crew members get to preside over a theme party of their own choosing. The best-attended party, although some of the top brass discreetly miss it, comes near the end of every world cruise when a crew variety show mimics the passengers: the most boring, most obnoxious, balmiest, the biggest pest, etc.

Some passenger antics are beyond parody. Magician Lee Bayless, who has entertained on cruises for the past 20 years, recalls one ship "where three ladies, all over 70, were taken off for cheating at bingo. They had brought along stick-on numbers to doctor the cards."

On another cruise "a lady confessed to being in cahoots with the lounge steward who was supposed to check the winning bingo cards but faked her score. They split jackpots worth over $1,000.

"Then there was an elderly millionaire who rented both penthouses, one for his manservant, and died the second night out. His man Friday lived it up the rest of the cruise with champagne parties, daily massages and buying out the gift shop."

Bayless, from Choctaw, Okla., also has embarked on a successful writing career at sea, authoring two novels and TV scripts for such shows as "E.R.," "Coach" and "Home Improvement."

Dancing across the oceans

Dance instructors Alan and Dawn McCormick, from Birmingham, England, first shipped out on the P & O liner Canberra in 1980. This voyage their most eager pupil, reports Alan, is "a lady 92 years young who never misses a class, no matter how rough the sea."

And some days the seas can be rough indeed. "The microphones and the cymbals topple over, but you keep playing," said jazzman Leney.

Cruise director Paul McFarland remembers a "terribly seasick" operatic soprano who bravely began an aria but let out a high-C shriek and fled in tears when the concert grand piano jumped its "boots," its restraining clamps, and advanced menacingly across the stage. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced to the sparse audience, "we have just had a piano movement performed by the ship."

Then there are those sun-gilded days and moonlit nights, right out of the travel folders, when all cruise ships at sea become love boats. Tim DeJarlais, the ship's golf pro from Minneapolis, has set the date for his wedding to a Swedish stewardess aboard.

At the welcome-aboard party, Capt. Harsheim announced his engagement to social hostess Rebecca Carlson from Las Vegas.

Sometimes a crew Cinderella meets her millionaire Prince Charming. "Last cruise a masseuse met and married a Hollywood producer," Lynda Ragsdale recalls. "When we next docked at Los Angeles, she came down to see us in her convertible BMW."

But romance is contractually forbidden to Dave Winter, a retired post office supervisor from Chicago, and the ship's five other unpaid "guest hosts." They travel free, with a generous liquor and laundry allowance, in exchange for dancing the night away with female passengers who usually outnumber males 2 to 1.

Hairdresser Kelchy has attended weddings of shipmates in France, Germany and Canada "and cried at every one."

"At sea you make friends for life," she says. "So we never say, `Goodbye.' Just, `See you later'."