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This week on The World Wanderers we are excited to be chatting with Riley Tench. Riley works as a lighting technician on cruise ships, and for the past 4 months has been “stranded”, living aboard a ship in the Pacific.
Riley has been documenting this journey on his YouTube channel and sharing what it has been like living through a pandemic while working on a cruise ship up until the point when ships stopped sailing.
In this episode, we talk about how Riley’s interest in travel started, what led him to working on cruise ships, and then talking through his experience of living through the pandemic and now spending 100+ days living on a ship without guests.
Enjoy!
In this episode:
- How Riley started traveling and working on cruise ships
- What is his day to day work like onboard?
- How did he first hear about the novel Coronavirus and what was the experience onboard like during this time?
- Where have they been and what has the ship been doing since they stopped running trips with guests
- Why did Riley decide to stay on the ship when he had the option to go home at one point
- What does day to day life look like today?
- Going into a 14-day lockdown when a crew member came down with a fever
- Why Riley started making YouTube videos
- Finding meaning through creation
If you would to get access to the past and future episodes of our nomad series as a World Wanderers Insider, head on over to Patreon.com/theworldwanderers. Thank you so much for your continued support!
Digital Nomad Life: Stranded On A Cruise Ship
Welcome to the World Wanderers podcast, your source for travel stories, travel destinations, and travel philosophy. We are your hosts Ryan and Amanda, and we will be taking you on today’s adventure as we speak with this week’s guest.
In this week’s episode, we are chatting with Riley Tench, who is joining us from a cruise ship in the Philippines!
In the past hundred-plus days, he has lived on this cruise ship, and he has an interesting story to tell about how he ended up there.
We were excited to have him on our podcast after discovering his YouTube channel. We wanted to know more about him, and how life is for someone stuck on a cruise ship during a global pandemic for such a long time.
But first, as always, we were eager to learn how he got his start in travel and how he managed to get into this business, and the stories that he told us were just as entertaining as his YouTube videos!
How Riley started traveling and working on cruise ships
He shared his first traveling experiences, which were trips with his adventurous traveling family.
“Ever since I was a kid, my parents were big travelers. We explored a lot of the world, especially the United States from a pretty early age. I grew up in North Carolina, and when I was 12, we ended up making a cross-country trip to move to Alaska. So that was a crazy Odyssey by itself.”
Having been introduced to the world by traveling from such a young age sparked curiosity about cruise ships. So, since he started high school, he always liked the idea of working on one, and eventually, this became his job!
“We’ve always been adventurous as a family and that carried into my adult life. The idea, the prospect of cruise ships and working on one from an early age in high school, always intrigued me. And here I am, just traveling around the world, working on a cruise ship.”
During his talk, he describes his journey and what it has been like sailing the world for a living. It turns out that he began working on another boat before ending up on the boat he is currently on.
“I started on a different cruise ship, on Anthem Of The Seas… So I was still cruising with mostly Americans and stuff, but it got my toes wet for the experience. And then after that, I was given the opportunity to take another contract on the Quantum Of The Seas out here in Asia. And so far, I’ve done two contracts out here.”
What is his day-to-day work like onboard?
Later on, we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the actual working process and find out more about his daily duties. As a lighting technician, Riley explains some of the duties he would carry out before the global pandemic when the boats were full of passengers.
“When doing normal operations and stuff, I would be a lighting technician. So, you know, we have a lot to do, it’s a big cruise ship. We have a lot of entertainment options onboard. We have full-on production shows, some of our shifts even have full Broadway productions and you need technicians and stage staff and people keeping track of all this stuff behind the scenes and making sure those shows go off without a hitch.”
Having been a part of the entertainment segment on cruise ships, we get a first-hand look at what it’s like behind the scenes.
“So I generally get put in charge of a specific venue on the ship and all of the lighting fixtures and elements of lighting in that room. And then I’ll be running the console during the shows and programming new shows and doing maintenance if anything breaks and stuff like that.”
How did he first hear about the Coronavirus and what was the experience onboard like during this time?
Unfortunately, while he was enjoying traveling the world and working on this amazing ship, as we all know, the global pandemic started. It’s interesting to hear what it was like and how that affected Riley’s life on the cruise ship.
Since this boat was closer to the first wave of Coronavirus that came out of China, the passengers and staff here were some of the first people to find out about the pandemic. As soon as the news was out, Riley says everything came to a halt.
The company took a step back and canceled all future sailings out of concern for everyone’s safety.
“It’s interesting because we were so much closer to the initial wave that came out of China. I think it affected us a lot sooner than the rest of the world. In January we were definitely reading the news. There’s this new virus in China and it’s not looking very good, and it just kept progressively getting worse. And it must have been late February that we ended up canceling three future sailings, just to kind of take a step back for about 14 days and take a look at the situation and hit the pause button.”
Where have they been and what has the ship been doing since they stopped running trips with guests
Cruise ships, in particular, have been hard-pressed to move around after the pandemic began. Several countries went into lockdown and the ships had no choice but to stay in one place.
“Everything shut down quickly. So, when we stopped cruising, a lot of the cities and ports around us were already starting to go into lockdown and start putting restrictions on movement, border control orders, and all that stuff. So it became really difficult for us to move anybody on or off the ship because cruise ships got a lot of bad press.”
In the beginning, all staff were still present on board, while also getting paid. But unfortunately, they haven’t been able to afford to keep all of them on the payroll.
“We were just kind of playing the waiting game and watching the numbers. I don’t really know what was going on behind the scenes, but eventually, they decided that they just couldn’t afford to keep so many people on the payroll. So I had been using the opportunity to catch up on a bunch of maintenance on my lights and eventually they just decided they had to cut a bunch of those contracts.”
But even though they are not being paid, Riley shares that he has been enjoying this time. All the staff that is left on the boat is being treated well and they have been getting free food and accommodation.
“We were still on the ship for a while, just being unpaid, but they’ve still been treating us really well, still feeding us and giving us so much freedom, free amenities, and stuff like that. We’ve been going all over the place.”
Currently, they are all just playing a waiting game, just as everyone else in the world, and their only concern is getting people back home.
We get to hear what that has been like, and how they managed to get most of their crew members back to their countries.
“So, it got to the point that pretty much the most economical way to get some of the crew members home repatriated to their countries was to physically move the ship to that country and physically put the people on one of our lifeboats and take them to the dock at the country and then just give them their passports and put them back in their country. We did that for China, we went up to Shanghai, dropped off all of our Chinese crew members that wanted to sign off. It’s all just kind of an effort to get people home at this point. But now that we’re leaving Manila, we got most of the people that wanted to get off. In fact, I think everybody that did want to get off has gotten off now.”
Why did Riley decide to stay on the ship when he had the option to go home at one point?
But even though Riley says he has had the option to return back home as well, he still chose to stay on board until everything returns back to normal.
Why is that? We were curious to hear this story too, just as everyone else in his YouTube audience.
“Yes, I did have the option to fly home. They gave me that option twice. I said no both times. A lot of people in my YouTube comments have been asking me to go more in-depth about that decision, and I don’t know, I feel like it wasn’t that complicated.”
He thus realized that it made more sense for him to stay since nothing is at stake. Since he still gets everything he needs to survive for free, has his friends and crew members surrounding him, and most importantly his girlfriend, he says that there is no reason why he should return home where he would be doing the same things as when he was quarantined.
At least this way, he gets to be a digital nomad and travel around the world, which is an interesting and unique experience in itself.
“I’m here, I’m safe. I’m in this kind of quarantined bubble, this familiar space that I know, free food, free place to stay. I’ve got my girlfriend here.”
What does day to day life look like today?
Obviously, life on the boat changed after the spread of the Coronavirus, and it was interesting hearing what it has been like. Our goal was to get a firsthand perspective, other than the vlogs you can see on his YouTube channel!
“It’s been really weird to be unemployed in your own workplace and not able to go home… It’s nothing glamorous or exciting, we exercise, we eat food, we watch TV and I make videos.”
The whole journey, he says, has been a great experience of self-reflection and self-development. He has had time to reflect and to be thankful for all the things he has.
Getting time to spend with himself was something he lacked, and it has really helped him in so many ways that he is truly blessed to be “stuck” there!
“I don’t know how else to put it. There’s not much going on. I guess to a lot of people, it sounds boring, but it’s nice. It’s given me a lot of time to think and reflect about life and just kind of hit the pause button and take stock of what’s important. And it’s been really interesting, especially now that most of our friends have gone home from the ship, it’s basically down to the two of us. It’s different and you spend a lot more time with yourself just reflecting on things. I love that. “
Going into a 14-day lockdown when a crew member came down with a fever
The 14-day lockdown on this cruise ship has been one of the highlights of his stay. He spent the entire time in his room. He shares how he coped with the whole situation and what he did to fill up the time. The experience was definitely interesting, to say the least.
“We’re doing temperature checks for the entire crew right now, twice a day. And somebody did end up getting a fever. I want to say it was like a month or two ago and the entire ship went into a 14-day lockdown.”
After one of the crew members got a fever, it wasn’t just him and his girlfriend that was locked up, but the whole ship as well! These two weeks were challenging, but also something really great came out of this, which he covers later on.
“We had to stay confined to our guest stateroom for fourteen days, me and my girlfriend. So that was something else, like another challenge entirely. Fourteen days in essentially a small hotel room. On the bright side, we had a balcony, so we could go outside and get fresh air and sunlight and stuff, but it was something.”
He describes how they have handled and the care they received from outside. But also, it was interesting to find out that during this time, his creative way of passing the time led to him growing his YouTube channel!
“They would bring room service, three meals a day. There was a lot of Netflix and Disney+, and just general recreational activities involved. I’ve got this little VR headset that we used for exercise a lot of the time, but it was mostly just coming up with creative ways to fill time.”
Why Riley started making YouTube videos and finding meaning through creation
As he described previously, by finding a creative outlet, he was led to start making his videos. He found himself in an unusual situation and decided to make something out of it by sharing the experience with the rest of the world.
Through this, he was also able to express his emotions and everything that they have been going through, and fortunately, this got everyone’s attention.
“Just filling time and finding an outlet is the main reason I started making my videos.
My YouTube videos have been a great way to give myself a creative outlet and a way to express all the emotions and stuff that I’ve been going through, and just to be creative and stay productive, but also kind of process a lot of this stuff that’s been going on, that we’ve been going through emotionally.”
When he started doing this, his goal wasn’t reaching popularity, but rather it was just a creative way of expression and coping with the overall emotional situation.
“When I first made the videos, I think the most viewed video I had for more than a year was like 159 views or something like that. And that was the very first video that I made, where I flew from Alaska to Shanghai to sign on to the cruise ship.”
And finally, now that he realized how his content has spread all over the world, he feels lucky to have found himself in such a position. The content he creates is really unique and unusual, and basically marks the start of his digital nomad career in some way.
“Nobody’s allowed to go on cruise ships right now. I feel like that’s the big draw. People are starved for that cruise ship experience and that lifestyle. And because I’m pretty much one of the only people left that’s making content like that, I think I just got the lucky right place at the right time.”
Last Words
Even after all this craziness is over, and the world shifts back to normal, he still hopes to keep doing this, since it is something he finds fulfilling.
He never plans to stop traveling the world, and this scenario that puts him in such a situation would hopefully play out to be a head start to something even more amazing.
And even though being “stranded on a cruise ship” might sound scary, it is something worth experiencing, and definitely, a journey that ends with a positive outcome.
Found his story fascinating? You should definitely check out Riley’s content, and get more insight into his daily life as he sails through the world in the most unusual way!
