27 August 202624:49252 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Nine days away, a yard that had gone jungle in the meantime, and two boards dragged straight off the plane. The Lift X went in the water before anything else got dealt with. This is the ride that followed, and it is one long unfiltered rant delivered while carving. Fair warning that the language is not cleaned up.
The setup
The trip was an Alaska cruise, on Virgin Voyages rather than the Carnival trip that soured the whole idea years ago. Two things about it were genuinely better: no children on board, and food that did not feel as mass produced. Neither was enough.
The actual argument
Strip out the venting and the complaint is about a way of travelling rather than about a boat. A cruise is a schedule. You are always on the clock, always due back aboard by a time, always moving between a thing you have to be at and the next thing. Ports arrive at the rate of one a day and start to feel interchangeable, the same souvenir shirt with a different town printed on it.
The excursions land the same way. Paying a couple of hundred dollars to kayak on a lake is a strange trade when you own kayaks and paddle out at night to look at stars for free. A fishing trip out of season with no bait and unbarbed hooks is fishing as a performance. If you have already done the activity, the version built for people who have not is going to disappoint you.
Then there are the lines. Lines to board, lines for the wristband that becomes your wallet, lines through security, lines to get off and lines to get back on. For someone who lives on acreage specifically to avoid neighbours, being packed into narrow corridors with thousands of people is the opposite of rest.
The food was adequate rather than good, and finding roughage without dairy in it turned into a daily negotiation, since nearly every dressing on offer was a creamy one. The social centre of the ship is drinking, and drink packages get bought by the hundreds of dollars before departure. If you barely drink, the main strategy for making the boredom fun is not available to you. The game room was too dark to see the pieces, and whatever game did get going was talked over by karaoke or trivia.
The part that is really about eFoiling
Eight full days without getting on the water is the complaint underneath all the others. The preference here is the same one that shapes how the riding works: find one spot, learn it properly, and go back to it, rather than collecting new ones. An island and a wave you know well beats a port a day. That is a defensible way to think about riding as well as about holidays, and it is the reason the first thing that happened after landing was a session rather than unpacking.
How it ends
Lightning moved in and cut the rant short, which was probably a mercy. If you love cruises, none of this needs to bother you. That point gets made explicitly at the end.
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