If you have ever spent more than a couple of days at sea you will know how the isolation can relax the mind and free you from a lot of the stresses of the modern world.
But how long would it take for you to feel the strange fear and alienation that comes with weeks or months at sea with only the people you are sailing with for company, For good or ill, you are all in the same boat.

One particular experience I had whilst working on a very famous cruise liner was the most alienated I would ever feel.
It began with a toast as we pulled out of Southampton and the bridge got the all clear from the Pilot to open up the engines and get us fully on our way.
New York bound and my first ever glimpse of the Big Apple. I was eager to say the least. I could have jumped over the bow with a rope in my teeth right then and pulled us across the stormy north Atlantic. My first real adventure in a new continent. I was 22.

Five days later I stood on the poop deck of the worlds most grand and historical ocean liner with a Cuba Libra in one hand and a disposable camera in the other, listening to the enormous mast scraping the bottom of the Verrazano bridge that connects Staten Island to Brooklyn and waiting for that perfect shot to record my huge smiling face and that of my travelling friends and co-workers with the beautifully green Statue Of Liberty.

Off the ship and almost dancing my way out of the port, I pointed out The USS Intrepid, the retired aircraft carrier that sits permanently in the dock at 86th street and got a Oooo’s and Eeee’s from the giddy crowd behind me that were laughing at my impetuousness and the fact that I had let my enthusiasm get the better of me and I turned to Dave, (the only one of the group who had visited NY before) to take the lead and get us our breakfast.

We stopped for a bite in Munson’s Diner, a small and yet surprisingly accurate portrayal of our exact expectations of what a New York diner should look like. There were the doughnut eating cops sitting by the window keeping an eye on the squad car in case someone tries to steal it, and there was the lumberjack looking trucker guy sitting at the counter chewing on something very hearty looking and not noticing the wide eyed foreigners that spilled into the eatery looking a little too excited for 9 o’clock on a hot and humid October morning.
We were in our booth talking about what we wanted to see first; The Empire State building, Central Park, The Rockefeller center for ice skating which we couldn’t do for another few months as was the word of a passing hobo who politely answered any questions we had with hideous screams at the diner window and then resumed walking backwards, urinating on his shoes.