19 November - sea day with Pirate Drill

I went to an earlier security talk where they explained a lot about the way that pirates operate in this area.  Bottom line is that the pirates are still unlikely to be able to take on a cruise ship, but the crew still aren't taking any risks, so we had an all ship drill.  The security guys aren't going to share much detail of course, but it does sound like among other things they have high pressure hoses to try to stop anyone from boarding; that's a pretty standard approach.  Definitely no firearms though.
The drill started with the pretense that pirates had managed to get onboard on deck 4, and that there was a fire there and that they'd had to move the medical centre to its alternate location.  Of course the passengers aren't involved in that part of it, but we do get to hear all the PA announcements.  Our part of it was that when they identified the possible pirates, we had to go to our stateroom, pull the curtains shut, and stay there, preferably sitting somewhere safe as in the real situation part of the ship's defences would be high speed turns which would make the ship list, and they don't want people to be injured when this happens.
From the pirate drill they continued on to the standard evacuation drill you always have to attend at the start of the cruise.  The deal is that some of the passengers are soon to reach 30 days on board (for example the ones who boarded in Southampton and are continuing past Dubai) and those people are obliged to do another drill.  And, they didn't make the drill at Civitaveccia mandatory for those of us who had all been onboard - instead they made us all attend this one.  It's really painful; not quite as bad as the Ovation of the Seas one but appalling music and because it's all pre-recorded it's aimed at people who are just boarding.  One interesting thing though - they had to delay the start of this part of the drill because they actually use artificial smoke for realism in the fire-fighting part of the drill, and some of the smoke had leaked into one of the passenger muster areas, so they delayed the drill until they could get rid of it.
Apart from that, just a standard day at sea.