Everyone woke up early to prepare for the entire day celebration: Fitter Philbert, with his teammate Edward, started rolling the pig on a bed of burning charcoal to make a traditional Filipino “Lechon” (roasted pig), while Bosun and his team started to prepare the venue by cleaning up the pool deck area; setting up the tables and chairs and installing the tent and swimming pool. And, of course, one of the most important things to prepare is the food wherein Chief Cook and his team are busy preparing various foods and mouthwatering desserts.
At around quarter to noon, Third Officer addresses everyone to proceed to the venue. The celebration starts with a prayer and a blessing of food, followed with Captain’s opening speech. First, he thanked the Lord for all the blessing and guidance throughout our journey and day-to-day living onboard. He also thanked everyone for doing a good job and performance during our port stay in ARA, especially successfully completing the four inspections we had. He elaborates to everyone to enjoy and be happy with our various activities prepared by our officers and engineers. But before we start attacking the food, our “ThreHsome Dancers” (short for three handsome dancers) showcased their talent through a dance number presentation.
After lunch, all the crew met on the bridge for our first activity. 3rd Officer Zyrus gave the instruction to everyone for the traditional Egg Hunting with a theme “Catch My Eggs”. 31 eggs painted with different designs were laid on a different location in 4th deck, 3rd deck, 2nd deck, and 1st deck. Every egg has a corresponding reward from our sponsors, therefore the more eggs you have, the more rewards you will get. Once a crew finds an egg, he needs to jump like a bunny going to 3rd Officer Zyrus and he will make a bunny sound “preeeeeeeeee” through the megaphone.
After the egg hunting activity, we took a 30-minute break to touch up and be energized for the next game called “Bow Cardinal Easter Olympic”. 3rd and 4th Engineer facilitated the games comprising the following games: Drawing Relay, Charades, Give Me Thy Names, Longest Line and Blow Me. The SMT will serve as judges during the entire games. Three groups were headed by Bosun, Pumpman, and Fitter as their team leaders and each group was composed of five members. Each game is a group activity in which they need to work as a team to win. Each game was a point system wherein the winner will accumulate a total of 15 points, the second will have 10 points and the last will take 5 points. In the end, one team was declared a winner and took a spot cash prize of 300 USD. The second prize took 60 USD worth of slop chest and 1.5 case of cola, while the third prize received 40 USD worth of slop chest + 1.5 case of cola.
The Easter Sunday Celebration was concluded with a grill party dinner and distribution of prizes earned by the crew. Before the end of that fruitful day, Captain once again gave his big thanks to everyone and advised our crew to continue the good performance and to always give best to make our good lady “Bow Cardinal” maintain its defined beauty and shine like a diamond. For the rest of the SMT they extended their warm-hearted gratitude to all the crew for their efforts to bring the utmost bonding and well-coordinated Team Bow Cardinal.
It was indeed a good celebration of camaraderie, friendship, and teamwork. As the Captain said, “it is not about the prizes but the happiness we gain, the laughter we make, and the bonding we create at the end of each activity”.
