Explorer 4-Night BC USPH inspection causes issues. Normal?

[land lover]

Okay, had a night to sleep on it, and I can explain some of the problems better.

 

If the ship's crew were expecting a USPH inspection in Hawaii, that was a serious miscalculation on their part, as the feds don't have the budget to fly the teams out there :D, particularly when the ship is coming soon to the mainland, and there was probably a USCG inspection in Hawaii, and they won't do both on the same day. And yes, the USPH will try to keep you guessing as to when they will show up.

 

The problem with fruit and food service came to me this morning. It has to do with a Department of Agriculture regulation regarding ship's garbage coming from foreign sources. If a ship lands garbage in the US, and any of that garbage has touched food (packaging, paper goods, etc) from foreign sources, the garbage is treated as biohazard waste, and costs an arm and a leg to dispose of. Further, this classification as "foreign garbage" lasts for one year after the last foreign port where food was sourced. To avoid this, you can clean the ship out of fresh food, have the ship inspected by the Dept of Ag., and load US sourced food. This is why they didn't pick up fruit in Hawaii (and likely didn't land garbage), and why they were slow in getting food service up. Another reason is Alaska, and their fairly strict laws on bringing in fresh fruits and vegetables from outside the US. So, the ship had a double whammy of getting rid of all the existing fresh food, and inspecting and loading the new stock, while undergoing a USPH inspection as well.

 

There are different standards for cruises in different places. It is up to the country being called upon to inspect cruise ships for sanitation. The USPH VSP is probably the strictest regime, but the EU has their own code, called ShipSan, and other countries that do not adopt their own regime follow the WHO regulations. All are basically the same, and cover far more areas of shipboard operation than just food safety.

 

As another poster mentioned you have really provided some informative info....

Thanks so much for your input...as now I know why choices in the WJ might have been lacking.

Edited May 22, 2016 by land lover

[jlmarr]

As land lover said, something seemed off and we were disappointed with this cruise, our second on RCI. We also talked to several RC vets who said the first day or two were below par. Actually that and this thread is reassuring since our Radiance cruise 10 years ago was great and we thought the cruise line might have gone downhill. Sounds like this cruise was an outlier.