That’s one of these beautiful travel stories I believe deserve to be told. Two days back I went for dinner to my favorite restaurant “Veli Jože” in Rovinj, nicely decorated with a lot of love for the detail and an excellent, yet very grounded cuisine with Germany-trained Chef “Vesna”. Waiting at the bar with a glass of red wait I got acquainted with a couple from London. They were seated first at a table, I was placed shortly after them in the middle of the same table where on the other side a couple in their, say, late 50s were already sitting. As I got to sit down right beside the lady, her husband joked in a deep low voice “This is your blind date.” – “That is the best which happened to me this week”, I retorted.
From there an interesting conversation spun with the elder couple to my left being from Australia, me in the middle from Germany-Croatia-India and the younger couple from the U.K. to the right. The gentleman with the deep voice had an accurately trimmed grey beard and explained that he was posted for a few weeks in Venice at a ship’s wharf: “The Italians build by far the best and nicest passenger ships in the world. A new one is going to be finished soon, the most remarkable the world has ever seen, a worthy follower of Queen Mary II.” It struck me from the beginning that the nature of his talk was very present, competent and charming. He added that his wife and him had taken a week off to come to Rovinj for vacation.
I asked him if he was an engineer who had to do some quality control on the ship before it would be delivered to the cruise-company? “No, I am actually in operations.” Pause. “I am driving ships.” Ok, I thought and wow that’s indeed cool. So I continued asking him persistently and I had literally to pull it out of his nose: He’s in fact the Captain. So he is doing the same what the first test-pilot of the Airbus A 380 is supposed to do when lifting the newly built plane into the air – with the new ship chartering the waters. Manoeuvring, navigating and testing, testing, testing. His background: Captain. Number One on huge cruise-liners like the before mentioned “Queen Mary II” on the Seven Seas. How cool is that.
Speaking about the new ship he is going to take for the test-ride, he was totally enthusiastic: “I saw her already and she is absolutely stunning!” The vigilant ear and eye immediately catch the notion that a ship from the Captain’s standpoint is female. We carried on speaking about the means of nautical navigation where the Captain had some concerns about the monopoly of the U.S. basically owning the system, his call for an additional European one and the necessity for young cadets not becoming complacent and still learning how to navigate by the stars. And yes, he laughed about my question, during these cruises there is still the “Captain’s Dinner”. So I had mine with him – on solid Croatian ground …
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