We are the Champions of the World! NOT!!!

NEAR FIJI--Saturday, February 27, 2010

If someone wins a bitterly waged contest on a trip around the world, does that person become the champion of the world? We certainly think that the winner of the Pacific Princess' Build a Boat Contest should be. The contest was announced last Sunday to keep us busy while the ship spent seven days crossing the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Fiji. We, and Ed and Mary of Cruise Critic, were recruited by our table mates, Roger and Adele, at the Lazy Sunday Brunch on February 21. Their partners at another table were to recruit team members also. Our "team" had 12 people when we learned that the maximum number could be six. Being logical people, we just assumed that only one person from each couple would officially be on the team, and the rest of us would work behind the scenes.

When we showed up for our first team meeting at noon on Monday, some of us learned that we had "been voted off the island" (Survivor) and were asked to leave immediately. Sara went back to our room and called Roger to let him know what supplies she had collected, in case he wanted them. He told her that Ed and Mary went up to the Panorama Buffet for lunch so we should try to meet them there. The six of us convened and half-heartedly discussed building a boat. Then the "mouth" of our former team came to our table to inform us that they had it all sewn up and would "blow us out of the water." At that moment six people who had just met each other were united in one effort to beat that woman and her haughty team members!

The major criteria for the contest were originality, creativity and beauty. During the week, we decided that our boat would be the Pacific Pearl, from a name that a crew member informed us was the next big Princess ship; we would be the Tacky Tourists who had won a free round trip to Shangla-la for winning the Name the Perfect Ship Contest; and the cruise line would be RAMSKE for the first letters of our names: Roger, Adele, Mary, Sara, Ken and Ed. Roger built the base of our ship from wine bottles and two trays, and he guaranteed it would float.

The rest of us took our marching orders from Roger and created a banner of flags from the Princess Patter, paper dolls with blue plastic hula skirts and shirts, three-dimensional life boats, a smoke stack from a blue box with netting and raised areas from wine boxes. We crafted the largest boat in the contest, and even had members of the cooking staff carve vegetable people for us. Amelia, a friend from Cruise Critic, loaned us a surfing Barrack Obama dashboard doll so we could say that RAMSKE Cruise Lines spared no expense in getting the big names and had a Plan B, in case the Pacific Pearl did not float, a blow-up boat we bought in the ship's boutique shore that we named the Pacific Pearl II.

Now here's where we beg to differ with the judges. Everything on the sheets with the criteria we received emphasized creativity. On the day of the contest, we procured a dolly from our cabin stewardess and triumphantly took the elevator to the pool area on Deck 9. As Mary proclaimed, she had never had so many people who wanted to take her picture. We truly believed that we were the biggest and the best. At the start of the contest, the cruise director announced the judges, all from the engineering staff, and we thought that we were given the wrong criteria for judging. These engineers were analytical-analyticals. While the written criteria stated creativity, the judges had a totally different definition of creativity. Sara teaches her class that a word has both denotations, dictionary definitions, and many different connotations, based on feelings.

The judges' idea of creativity was a team that downloaded the exact specifications of our ship and constructed a exact model of it in miniature and then named it the Pacific Princess. We did not even place in the competition nor did our nemesis, who built a boat called the Roman Roamin' Princess and wore bed sheets as togas like the movie Animal House. Their boat wasn't that great but they should have scored points for their costumes. We were so disappointed but we believe if there had been a popular boat rather than a vote of the electoral college, we might have won. Oh, well, we had fun!