Before I started this current contract, I knew I would be doing a “repositioning voyage”. That is ship lingo for switching from one home port to another, usually over a vast distance. In this case we would be repositioning from Sydney, Australia to Athens, Greece. The original itinerary included some major bucket list destinations for me across Southeast Asia including Thailand, Indonesia, India and Egypt. We were originally scheduled to do an overnight in Bali on my birthday, I’d rented a house and booked a private chef and everything. About two weeks before I left NYC, I found out that the itinerary was changing due to the war in Gaza and subsequent conflict throughout the Middle East. It was no longer safe to send ships through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, so instead our ship would be heading west across the Indian Ocean, around the southern tip of Africa, up into the North Atlantic, through the straight of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. Aka we would be going the long way around.

This new itinerary meant a lot of changes, one of which was many more sea days and far fewer ports. Instead of stopping at a new port almost everyday, we would be traveling over big stretches of ocean for long periods of time. Those stretches came down to two long sets, both seven days long. The first would be from Perth to Mauritius and the second would be from Namibia to Cape Verde. One day during this first stretch, while somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, my friend Vikki referred to “The Second Seven”, meaning the next set of sea days awaiting us after our African ports. A bell started ringing in my head. “The Second Seven” is an excellent name for a horror movie.

I had a conversation a few days prior with a passenger about the lack of horror movies set on cruise ships, it seems like a no brainer. There are a few, but other than “Triangle of Sadness” which isn’t exactly a horror movie no matter how horrifying it is, not many came to mind. The other new thing that the itinerary change brought us was far fewer passengers. These repositioning voyages can be quite popular with seasoned cruisers and usually sell out. After the schedule change was announced, everyone who had purchased a ticket on the original was offered a refund, a chance to switch to a different scheduled cruise, or to join the ship for the new repo. Most took the money or switched. Which left us with about half the usual passengers for 45 days. Can you imagine living with your audience for 45 days? Neither could I. An idea began to emerge.

Instead of actually writing a horror movie, I would like to offer to you dear reader, all of the ideas that I collected during the second seven. I intentionally waited until the whole thing was done until I wrote this blog post so as not to miss any possible inspiration. I’ll tell you what really happened and then how I think it could be spun into an excellent horror movie. As I’m posting these ideas online I’m aware that I’m releasing some pretty good IP into the wild. If anyone out there decides to actually write and produce this film, please cast me. I have lots of experience screaming on camera. Please god don’t go looking for evidence of it.

In the days leading up to the start of the second seven, somewhere near South Africa, we started experiencing some extreme weather. There were high winds and rocky seas which rocked the ship back and forth with an intensity that I had never felt before. One night the ship rolled so much I thought I was going to fall out of bed. Whenever we hit a particularly big wave at a weird angle there would be a loud BANG and the ship would violently shudder (this was especially pronounced at the front of the ship where my cabin is). Then there were the lightening storms. Major thunder and lightening that lit up the sky. I turned out all the lights in my cabin and pushed my face all the way up against the glass of my porthole to watch the lightening strike the sea. It was breathtaking. Next came the fog. One morning I went upstairs to the galley for breakfast and when I finally glanced out the huge floor to ceiling windows, there was nothing. No sea, no sky, nothing. It was like someone had closed the curtains on the outside world. We were sailing through a fog bank so thick the captain had to sound the horn every few minutes to alert any other sea traffic of our location. Visibility had to have been less than 10 feet. I had never seen anything like it. It was disorienting and isolating to say the least.

The fog delayed our arrival into Cape Town by many hours. Debarking crew members and passengers missed their flights, embarking crew and passengers stood in the terminal for hours waiting for the ship to arrive, it was a mess. The wild part was, the fog was only over the water. Just meters away in Cape Town itself, it was a clear, beautiful, sunny day. It was as though we were trapped in another dimension. Obviously the fog is cursed right? It doesn’t want to let us go. We did eventually make it to land, but the delay had done damage to our tight schedule. What was supposed to be a very short stop in Cape Town turned into an overnight stay. The biggest news to come out of this delay? We wouldn’t be able to make one of our planned ports of call in Cape Verde, and so the second seven would become THE SECOND NINE. We began affectionally referring to it as The Second Seven Eight Nine.

Our final stop before the official start of the second seven eight nine was Walvis Bay, Namibia. I actually had an incredible day in Namibia. A small group of us booked an excursion four wheeling in the dunes. It was a wild and wonderful experience. To be out there deep in the desert surrounded by miles and miles of open sand dunes is something few get to experience. However, I think we may have angered some Namibian sand Gods. Our friend and onboard physical therapist Jose fishtailed his four wheeler on a dune and flipped it, banging himself up and giving himself a concussion. My ship bestie Vikki tried to take a ziplock bag full of sand onto the ship and was very much denied. Maybe this angering of the sand gods is what allows the true curse of the fog to take hold.

As we sail away from Namibia, the second seven eight nine officially begins, now with a curse upon the fog that clings to us like a bad smell. Or maybe that smell is coming from the literal garbage patch that we sailed though. One morning while at breakfast I noticed a group of people pointing and taking photos out the window. Upon inspection it turned out we were sailing though a long stretch of yellowish green rubbish as far as the eye could see. It was a heartbreaking sight. Perhaps this is a story about environmental destruction and the sea gods are mad at us too.

Now comes the illness. The most common and most devastating kind of outbreak to occur on cruise ships is AGE, acute gastroenteritis. It’s highly transmissible and the villain of every cruise ship horror story you’ve ever heard. Well we got it baby. That and Covid which is still very much a thing. There are all kinds of maritime laws and regulations about how to deal with AGE and Covid and how to handle an outbreak. There are different levels of urgency and sanitation that go into effect depending on how many cases you have onboard. We never went above level two, but what if we had? And let’s not forget about the heart attacks. Not many people can afford these super long journeys except old, retired people, so health issues like heart attacks are not uncommon on cruise ships. We had several diversions both in the first and second seven for this very reason.

Let’s talk about Bryan. Bryan is a passenger who had been on the ship since the repo began. Bryan is one of those passengers who likes to imagine that he’s friends with the crew, who likes to be overly familiar. Bryan propositioned several crew members who he fancied. If you’ve read my earlier posts then you know that fraternization with passengers is a big NO NO and is grounds for immediate expulsion. So even if these crew members had wanted to hook up with Bryan, which they did not, they couldn’t have. Bryan expressed to my friend Steve that he had been stalking him and his partner online. While he was at it he mentioned that he had also stalked that guy and that guy and that guy, pointing to all crew members that were in the immediate vicinity. Then Bryan stole Steve’s crew ID card and ran away with it. Steve had to ask someone else to get it back for him. Bryan also has a bad habit of getting very handsy. I imagine that in our fictional second seven, Bryan cracks and starts murdering all the men who reject him, obviously.

Halfway through the second seven we crossed the equator. This is a major rite of passage in naval history and includes an initiation ceremony and a special certificate. When one crosses the equator at sea for the first time they graduate from being a lowly polliwog to becoming a trusty shellback. Don’t ask me what any of this means, you can google it. It’s a navy thing. This was a rite of passage I was anticipating, as a family friend who had been in the navy was very excited for me when he heard I would be crossing the equator. However, there is something else that occurs when you cross the equator that I wasn’t expecting. The dreams. I had one particular night of very disturbing dreams. One which shook me so much I awoke with a start, heart beating, unable to go back to sleep. I overheard some musicians asking each other if they were having strange dreams over lunch. It turns out that he had heard from several passengers that THEY had been having upsetting dreams. Now I’m no scientist, but I know how to use the internet and it turns out that there is some association between geomagnetic activity and the bizarreness of ones dreams. We happened to have crossed the equator very near the prime meridian*, thereby increasing such geomagnetic levels. I can imagine that these intense and bizarre dreams could cross over into hallucination territory. What’s real and what’s imagined? Does everyone onboard go mad?

*sidenote when you cross the equator at the prime meridian you are deemed a “royal diamond shellback” no big deal.

I’ve lost the plot. To be fair there never really was a plot to begin with, but this is a pretty generous pile of bullshit to occur in a short period of time. In real life, we all survived. After nine straight days at sea, we arrived in Tenerife and ate tapas and drank sangria and touched the earth. But in our horror movie, maybe we never make it. Maybe the second seven eight nine becomes 10, 11, 12. Maybe the fog takes us and keeps us forever. Maybe Bryan kills all the men onboard and the women come together and catch him and throw him overboard and the fog releases us from its grip because the fog is a feminist. Maybe there’s too much here for one movie and it becomes a franchise and makes me rich. Whatever happens, the actual experience of the repositioning was once in a lifetime type shit that was ripe with ups and downs. I’ve never been so grateful to be back in the Mediterranean (which is saying a lot because I’m always grateful to be in the Med). Yesterday was my first time in Barcelona and tomorrow I get to pop my cherry in Malta. A few days later we finally arrive in Athens and the real meat of this contract begins. I’m not bored yet.