Thursday - day 13 - Seaday

Our second seaday in a row...

We joined "Coffee with Jai" (the cruise director) - his guest today was Environmental Officer Nick Sarnis.

The Environmental Officer position is a Senior Officer level (just under the Captain). He does not have a staff -- he said that all of the crew works for him, as he identifies how each department needs to implement standards imposed by countries or the Holland America company. 

Some interesting things he shared:

• They collect up waste and manage much of it onboard. On 7 day cruises, they are returning to a home port each week and just offload there. But, on a 28-day cruise like this one, they have to arrange for vendors in different ports who will be able to take waste that cannot be otherwise disposed of.
• Soft food waste (like lettuce, rice, other food) is processed by a biodigester, ground up by peach pits, treated with enzymes - when it is digested down to a juice, it can be released into the sea water (international waters, 12 miles off the coast).
• Hard food waste (like bones, things that cannot be eaten) are dehydrated, crushed into small pieces, ready to compost. Vendors at different ports are able to take this and use it locally.
• Waste water - grey and black water. Goes through waste water treatment, separated - tested to ensure the water is at appropriate levels, and can be discharged into the sea. 
• The crew (cabin stewards, workers in the kitchen areas) sort materials, and then there is a group of people who do additional sorting in the under belly of the ship. They separate out aluminum (compacted), glass (crushed), cardboard (compacted), plastics (shredded). Each of these goes to specific vendors in ports.
• A statistic: they used to calculate that each person created about 1.5kg (3.3 pounds) of food waste per day. They changed the way food is delivered in the buffet (the servers measure out the servings instead of peoples serving themselves) and now the waste is down to 0.37kg (0.8 pounds) per person. While you can go back and get more, as much as you want, this limits the "eyes are bigger than your stomach" issue.
• Drinking water on the ship is from reverse osmosis and distilling seawater; they put minerals back in, and return the extracted salt back into the sea.

It was an interesting talk! 

We had planned to attend a couple of talks -- Carl attended, I decided to go back to the cabin. I'm coughing enough that I don't feel so comfortable being with people. 

He went to one talk by the onboard astrophysicist guest presenter, Tom Vassos. He is specifically onboard due to the solar eclipse coming up next week.

Carl also attended a presentation by a guest presenter, David Perry, who is presenting about ships.

We were meeting up with Joe and Pat in the afternoon to listen to the classical music trio, when there was an announcement about an iceberg off the starboard side...

I headed to an outdoor deck to get pictures -- with the people in front of me (and ship's outdoor light fixture on the left side), you can get an idea of what it looked like at a distance...

... zoomed in a little bit...

... zoomed in more. The announcement said that this one had a hole in it that is sometimes called a "whale cave" -- you can see it near the water line to the right of center.

You can also see that the fog has lifted which is nice. We had about 18 hours of fog, and we knew that there were icebergs in the area. The ship had slowed down quite a lot (from 20+ knots to 12-14 knots).

We've also been told that we will need a skip a stop at Nanortalik as that is in the area that we just passed through where the fog and icebergs are located -- we would need to slow down so much to safely get into the port, that by the time we got there, we would not have much port time. So, they are going to extend the time we have in the port before (Nuuk), and will spend the day cruising through some fjords instead.

We still got to hear the classical music trio playing "music from the movies".

We finished up with dinner in the main dining room and settled in for an earlier-than-normal evening to again try to have success eliminating our colds.