He's been at sea for more than 30 years. The woman he married almost that long ago has been at his side ever since he carried her…not across the threshold, but off the deck. Today, he is the captain of one of the world's biggest cruise ships.
And it all began with being seasick.
His name is Frank Juliussen. He's one of the two captains of the Norwegian Epic. He comes from the fishing islands called Lofoten, in the north of Norway, and as a teenager he decided that he didn't want to fish. The option was to go to sea.
"My Dad had a fishing boat," he recalls, sitting one day on the bridge of the Epic. "He didn't allow me to go with him. He sent me out with a friend and told me to make my own money. The first season you have to do the cooking. I was 15 years old. I was used to the sea but not in bad weather so the first 14 days I was throwing up every day…and I had to do the cooking at the same time. So after 14 days the skipper came and he told me: 'Frank, I think you should consider going ashore.'"
But young Juliussen was either too determined or too afraid to return to his father as a failure.
"Please," he remembers saying to the skipper, "give me another chance."
The story of curing his seasickness is "too nasty" to print, but he tells it anyway. We'll reduce the graphic elements.
"What can I do to get rid of this?" he asked.
The skipper had one cure.
"Because he had seen me, he knew it was psychological for me. In the morning when he started the engine I had to go on deck and throw up. All it took was hearing the engine started. He gave me a cup and told me to go up in the shelter, where we bait the long lines."
Said his skipper: "You go there and take your time."
Juliussen's instructions were, well, a little tough to stomach. So he didn't. He couldn't. He returned to the deck and told the skipper.
"He told me to finish out the day at least. He knew. The seasickness was gone. I don't know if it was a psychological connection but it was gone, and I haven't had it since. But nobody wants to hear that story."
Life on a fishing boat was rough, and often in rough waters. He did it for eight years. He'd heard all about the sailor-man stories and their romances, and he found none of it. Until one day a telegraph trainee — "what we called a telegraphist baby" — followed him up the ramp behind a roll-on, roll-off vessel where he was doing some maintenance.
"She didn't dare go down, because it was too steep," he laughs, "so I had to carry her down on my shoulders."
Her name is Tove and soon after that she became his wife.
Before their children came along, Juliussen left fishing and went to carpenter's school because he wanted to be on land.
"We lived very close to the sea and every morning I heard boats coming in and I went down to the pier to look at them," he says. "She asked me if I wanted to sail again and I said yes. That was it."
With two small daughters at home, he went to captain's school. On his application, nobody asked about seasickness.
Tomorrow: Captain Juliussen's climb to the top of the Epic.
Royal Caribbean Grandeur of the Seas
7 nights
July 12, 2013
Baltimore (return): King's Wharf
Inside: $899
Cost per day: $128
www.royalcaribbean.com