ON BOARD THE NORWEGIAN SKY…
Captain Roger Gustavsen remembers the day his mother watched him at the helm of the Norwegian Dream. It was in the Kiel Canal, the busiest man-made waterway in the world 
that cuts through northern Germany and connects the Baltic Sea with the North Sea. The Dream was the fourth of six Norwegian cruise ships on which Captain Gustavsen has been an officer.
That experience was a little lost on his mother, a guest on the bridge.
“You know how mothers always like to tell their sons what to do — ‘Don’t drive too fast!’ — from the back seat of the car,” he laughs, remembering the moment. “Well, my mother and my uncle were on the bridge. I had a good eye on the stern, as we always do when we move away from the dock. I could almost feel my mother’s eyes on the back of my neck. Then she said: ‘Shouldn’t you be looking THIS way?’ We were almost away from the pier, and she said: ‘Do you know what you are doing? It’s very close there.’ She wanted to tell me how to drive the ship!”
When Captain Gustavsen next boards a Norwegian ship, following a 10-week vacation that includes Christmas, it will be his seventh — the Gem. He is from Norway, as 19 of NCL’s captains are. He grew up in Larvik, about 65 miles southwest of Oslo and a port on the North Sea.
That he would wind up spending his working life on a ship was inherited.
“I followed in my father’s footsteps, but he was only on cargo ships,” says Gustavsen. “He died when he was 45 but he started when he was 15. They had to be 15 to go whale hunting on ships in those days, and they started in the galley.”
After serving his own seaman’s apprenticeship on fishing and cargo vessels, Roger Gustavsen joined Norwegian as a first officer, 13 years ago. That was on the Crown, which is no longer part of the Norwegian fleet, nor are his next three ships — the Sea, the SS Norway and the Dream. Before his two-plus years on the Norwegian Sky, he was captain of the Sun.
The captains never know what’s next until the current contract is almost complete.
“We generally stay two or three years with each ship,” he explains. “It really doesn’t matter. A ship is a ship. They have a rotation. I never shy away from moving forward. I’m going to the second-newest one, the Gem. That experience is good. You need to be on top of things. It is like any job…but on cruise ships we don’t go where there is bad weather. It’s always nice weather.”
At this personable captain’s invitation, we watched the Sky leave Miami from the bridge. in fact, from the little platform on the outside of the bridge, with him and Staff Captain Stefan Nording, from Sweden. it’s a fascinating experience, especially when you realize that captains do give the instructions that get ships in and out of ports…they don’t just stand idly by and watch the computers do it.
One captain maneuvers, and one communicates.
“I don’t think we have any ships that can do it themselves, although it is more accurate than it used to be,” Captain Gustavsen says. “You still need to have people to make the decisions, to make the turns, to stay away from traffic.”
Even though this was not our first experience on the bridge, we didn’t tell Captain Gustavsen how to steer the boat.
Only mothers can get away with that.