Life behind the scenes on a cruise ship

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Ahoy crew, welcome aboard!

My name is Anna, but most people call me Boo. I work as a performer on a cruise ship. This has been my life for the past three years and I am about to embark on my fourth ship contract.

I live at sea on contracts that last six months at a time. I exist in a double life between the strange floating world that most people only see for a week and my life of the last 22 years in New York City.

I used to refer to my land life as my “real life” but the longer I’m at sea, the less either feel particularly real.

This is Ship Log Blog.

It’s where I write about what life is actually like behind the scenes at sea and how it feels to step back on land.

The parts few people see.
The parts you can never truly understand unless you live it.
The parts that are funny, exciting, heart breaking, beautiful, lonely and surreal.

Because working on a cruise ship is not a normal job.
It’s a lifestyle that completely messes with your sense of time, relationships, sleep, geography, and self.

One day you’re watching the sunset in the middle of the ocean.
The next you’re trying to remember what country you’re in.
You form intense friendships that last a contract and disappear at the gangway.
You live in a tin can with thousands of people and still find ways to be completely alone.

And somehow, you also become completely addicted to this life. That’s the part that surprised me the most.

I started writing Ship Log Blog because friends and family kept asking the same questions:

“What is it really like to work on a cruise ship?”
“Aren’t you sad to leave home?”
“Can you fuck the passengers?”

The answer to that last one is no. The answers to all the others were too big and too complicated for small talk.

So I started writing them down.

Here, you’ll get stories about:

• Crew life and the weird rules we live by
• Ports around the world through crew eyes
• The emotional whiplash of living half your life at sea and half on land
• Relationships and what both distance and extreme closeness does to them
• The funny, the absurd, and the unexpectedly profound moments that happen on board

This isn’t a travel blog.

This is a logbook from someone living at sea.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens below deck, you’re in the right place. Except it’s not a Bravo show about a luxury yacht, it’s the diary of someone in the trenches struggling to find an empty washing machine in crew laundry on day six.

I plan to write once a week, either straight from my favorite spot on deck 7 or from the in between moments on land when I’m trying to remember what “real life” means.

If you’re new here, I’m really glad you found this corner of the internet.

And if you’ve been reading Ship Log Blog on my website for a while, welcome to the next chapter. This is where the stories arrive first now.

If you want to dig deep into the archives, check them out at http://www.shiplogblog.com

Thanks for being here.

Let’t set sail.