When I was working on Majesty, there was only one show venue. On the Explorer, we have two main venues. You have the Palace Theater which looks as you would expect a theater to look like. The other venue is an ice rink called Studio B. As it turns out, one of Royal Caribbean’s claim to fame is the only cruise line to offer ice skating on the ship. Not only is there free time to skate on the ice, but there is also an ice skating show. The international ice cast are able to do amazing things even during rough seas. It becomes more impressive when they land their jumps in choppy waters. There have been times when the show had to be cancelled due to weather.

As a part of the not-so-glamourous side of my job, I had to stay up late for a mini-melt. I finished work at 1:45 AM and still had to start the next work day at 9:00 AM. A mini-melt is when we let the top layer of ice melt so we can remove it. During normal operations in order to keep the ice smooth, we scrape a thin layer of ice off the top to get rid of the lines created from the ice skates cutting into the ice and then add water on top to fill in any gaps from the deeper cuts. Ultimately, the water added raises the level of the ice faster than the scraping can take it away. Thus, every now and then, we need to do a mini-melt. As the name would suggest, there are full melts as well. The ice is normally kept somewhere between -10.5°C and -9.5°C. The older and/or thicker the ice is, the colder we have to keep it in order to maintain it. Before the mini-melt, the production manager of Studio B had to keep the ice colder due to seeing puddles during the ice shows due to the lights heating up the surface. The full melt is a long process that requires constant attention. Once everything has melted, the ice is made by adding thin layer of water, letting it freeze, and repeating the process until everything is properly frozen. This ensures smooth ice that is to the level desired. The last thing skaters want are dips or hills in the ice.

I found out while talking to the ice cast that skate for figure skating and hockey are designed differently and the two should not mix on the same ice for best results. Figure skates, which is what the ice cast uses, are designed for a deep cut in order to have better control during skating as well as including those spikes at the front of the skate known as a toe pick. Hockey skates go for a shallow cut in order to be able to react to the game faster. The hockey players will complain about the deep channels created from the figure skaters, and the figure skaters complain about the torn up surfaces the hockey players make.