Voyage 4 – December 11th through the 20th
Once upon a time Lyubov Orlova was a Soviet film star. She made her career in silent films, she worked through the Communist era, and Josef Stalin was a fan. Now she is a polar expedition sailing vessel. She has two sister ships, one of them also chartered by Quark, which is today named the Clipper Adventurer. The third sister may or may not be sailing. Nobody seems to know. In the Quark brochure the Clipper is described as “elegant” while my ship is kindly bestowed the euphemism “sporty.” Last night my sporty vessel was compared to a cantankerous old lady, but I will get to that later.
This is the second season I’ve called the Lyubov Orlova my home and over time I’ve become quite familiar with all of her nooks and crannies. This year I sleep in cabin 601, and I’m grateful for this because although the beds are narrow and the storage space is nil, my windows open to let in fresh air. This fact means a lot to me because I remember all too well how stuffy life is on the lower decks. Quality of sleep can differ greatly depending on which cabin you have been bestowed. I know how dramatically the cabins near the bow crash on the waves and how violently cabins on 600 and 700 deck lilt to and fro when at sea and how much the cabins on the crew side smell like cigarette smoke. I know the slow creaking groan the ship makes as she sways along open water; I listen to it every night while falling asleep.
I am familiar with the way she moves. When she rolls to the right, I automatically move to the left. I have learned to walk at an angle to accommodate for her lilts. I’ve even learned how to jog on her decks while at sea.
I depend on my Lyubov Orlova. It is her halls that I walk, her stairs that I climb, in her bar where I work. She is at once my best friend and my worst enemy. She in many ways behaves like a starlet: She is strikingly beautiful, perfectly photogenic, unreliable, unpredictable, prone to terrible mood swings, yet she manages to retain a certain ineffable charm. She is at once my castle, my shack, my key to the world, and my prison.
My home weighs 4,251 tons and she really is a beauty. She is a deep navy blue, with white trim and white smokestacks. Across her bow, stern and sides is emblazoned the name Lyubov Orlova. If you look carefully you can see the remnants of her former lettering in Cyrillic. She arches out of the water with an increasing breadth, she is massive when you stand next to her. She is a rough and tumble boat. If you look closely at carpentry, the décor, or the steel structure itself, it is obvious that she was assembled with pragmatism in mind rather than luxury. That being said when she is sailing through straits and fjords at the end of the world, you can stand at the very top of the ship and watch the world go by from an unbeatable vantage point - kinda like riding in a colossal floating convertible.
The inside my ship is chalk full of kitsch. The cabins sport the strangest paintings of stallions and tabby cats, racehorses, Polynesian women, even a portrait of Lyubov herself, rising above the ship, her hair flowing and full of daisies. It is just magnifique.
Some would describe the décor in my bar as gauche, but I think I would call it ‘faux luxe’. The walls are a fake wood paneling and the upholstery is a deep emerald green and gold stripe, never mind the fact that about three booths are broken. It adds to the charm. And there is a great mural of the actress throughout her career on the wall accompanied by a short bio in terrible English. Really, it has just the right amount of dive. Add a jukebox and a couple cases of Labatt 50 and my bar would play well in Toronto.
Although she is a beautiful boat, she is absurdly unreliable. An example of this that has recently affected us is the recurring problem of one of her engines going down. She is meant to run on two engines, giving her a maximum cruising speed at her age and in her condition of about 11 knots. (Somewhere just under 22 kmh.) At this speed she can cross the Drake Passage in about two days, allowing for our standard four-sea-day-five-peninsula-day cruises. That works wonderfully unless she goes down to one engine. This obviously cuts her cruising speed in half. Just on the way down to the Peninsula during this cruise we were grimly looking at the prospect of having to cut our peninsula time in half on a cruise that is already only nine days long as opposed to the standard ten. But our fickle lady has been repaired, again, we’ve made up for lost time and the cruisers never knew their vacation was in jeopardy. Nevertheless, this is a problem that has been recurring since I’ve known her. This engine of hers is kind of like a bum leg. Most of the time she runs fine with it, but when it goes, it really cripples us.
Recently I had an interesting conversation about the Lyubov Orlova with one of our senior staff members, wherein he likened her to an old lady and there really is no better way to describe her. She gets tired. She gets cranky. She is arthritic. She can’t be pushed too hard. Something about her is usually broken at any given time. Yesterday we had a flood in our galley. Sometimes our drinking water is a rusty yellow-red. Other times fridges stop working. In the span of one afternoon in my cabin two lights stopped working and my shower flooded the hallway. Our toilet system loves to break down. It frequently gets backed up and every once in awhile this phenomenon is accompanied to the scent of sewage. How many years does she have left in her? Educated opinion seems to be about one. One year. Maybe two. Then what will happen to her? From what I understand, there are a few possibilities: She will either move to a different market, perhaps become a ferry in the Philippines, or she will be sold for scrap metal in India. It’s also possible that she will sink, either in a real accident or for insurance money.
As far as ships go, the Lyubov Orlova is my first love. Picturing her at the bottom of the ocean is hard for me to do when I’m lounging in my cabin, grinning at the tabby cat on my wall. Oh Lyubov, you cranky old bat; you smell, you hobble, you are in a constant state of disrepair, but I love ya. When you are no longer sailing the ocean blue, you will be missed.
And that is my Lyubov. This is me.
Science visited our boat last week in the form of a flying fish. It’s body, about ten inches long with bulbous eyes as big as its head and an impressive wingspan was found on the top deck when we were in Ushuaia. It’s now being kept in the freezer of our galley and apparently it is two very interesting things: Thousands and thousands of miles out of its natural habitat and of a taxonomy of flying fish that the science world currently has very little information about. Apparently the Natural History Museum of New Zealand wants it. Huh.
I’m finishing up my fourth visit to the peninsula and I looking forward to the next cruise. We will finally get a different itinerary. Not that the Antarctic Peninsula isn’t a fantastic place, but I’m admittedly starting to become jaded to this magnificent scenery. In a testament to the insatiable nature of humankind, I need a new fix. The next cruise is 18 days long and we sail to the Falklands and South Georgia Island, a place that I have been repeatedly told is la crème de la crème in it’s beauty. It is also the place where the legendary Ernest Shackleton is buried. We do a toast of rum at his grave. I’ve recently learned that there exists a subgroup of Shackleton superfans out there who come on these cruises and actually prepare speeches for these toasts and passengers have been known to start crying outright. Yes, please!
Christmas has never snuck up on me like it did this year. It is already the 20th of December and last time I checked it was over a month away. Nevertheless, thanks to an issue of Time magazine that a passenger brought on board, I seem to have gotten a small and wonderful Christmas surprise. I have just read that Vladimir Nabokov, my favorite writer and architect of the most wickedly luscious sentences that I’ve ever come across has just had fragments of his last unfinished novel posthumously published by his son Dmitri. The work is entitled The Original of Laura, or, Dying is Fun, and consists of copies of the index cards he used to compose the novel along with their transcriptions. The only question now is how I get my grubby mitts on it down here.
And as a parting thought, after the next cruise we will be well into January, marching up to the halfway point of the season already. In some ways the time just seems to shuffle along like a puttering old man. Everyone once in awhile a coworker will quip something like, “87 days to go!” and inside my head the thoughts, “87 days may as well be one hundred million years when it comes to this stupid boat crap” start and I become cantankerous and start to run on only one engine myself…other times I have to wonder how the days can drift by in such a way that I don’t notice until their gone. Four trips have already gone by like nothing. I’m celebrating another summer solstice tomorrow. Expedition staff has left that I probably will never see again. Christmas will come and go, and 2009 will become 2010, just like that.
But life is like this wherever we are, isn’t it?
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