10 Tips to Stay Sane on Sea Days While on Repositioning Cruises

We love to take repositioning cruises to get us from one continent to the next, and we have 10 tips for keeping ourselves sane during the many sea days that occur when crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific on cruise boats.

We love sea days. They provide a great opportunity to slow down and relax, to catch up on things we’ve been wanting to do, or to meet and mingle with other people on the cruise ship. But let’s face it. On repositioning cruises, those cruises that go one way across the oceans, having many sea days in a row can get a little monotonous. 

Sometimes on a repositioning cruise, we can get five sea days in a row. We’ve even had up to eight sea days because of situations where the boat can’t come into port due to weather. Although the entertainment staff usually do a great job of providing things to do like dance classes, trivia, games, and sporting events, even those can get tedious. 

After completing ten repositioning cruises across several cruise lines including Holland America, Princess, Carnival, Norwegian, MSC, and Cunard, we’ve got a few tips for how to stay sane while passing time on your sea days. 

1. Bring an analog clock or watch. (We love this one.) On repositioning cruises, you’ll go through many time changes. Often, your phone won’t keep up with the time changes because you won’t have a connection to the internet. Although you can manually adjust your phone, when you do actually get connected to the internet, you may have to fiddle with the settings again. Save yourself the drama and wear an analog watch or bring a wind-up clock, and you won’t have to worry about what time it is. (The ships’ clocks, by the way, are often wrong.)
2. Have a project to do. Even though there are many activities on the ship, bring something to do where you have a goal to complete it. Maybe it’s to write a poem, create a song, finish an embroidery project, or read Two Carry-ons and a Plan. Set goals each sea day to work on your project.
3. Take time in the gym. Rather than having to hurry through a workout, get to know the gym and use all of its equipment. Take some of the exercise classes, use the weight machines, and run on the treadmill. The best time to use the gym is in the mid-afternoon.
4. If you must use the internet, buy a GigSky esim (click here to get it) and start it before the ship leaves the dock. GigSky is the only data provider that works on ships. Rather than pay for the expensive ship’s internet, bypass it by purchasing GigSky. We don’t purchase GigSky for the entire duration of the cruise. We use our regular esim’s (Flexiroam) data in ports, and then we purchase a 7-day plan from GigSky to cover our longest stretch of sea days. 1 Gig gets us enough to check messages and glance at Facebook.
5. Plan to do laundry while onboard halfway through the cruise. Most cruise lines have self-catering laundry rooms. Instead of buying the soap, make sure you bring detergent sheets or bring a ziploc with some detergent in it to avoid overpaying for a single box of detergent in the ship’s laundry room. We love these laundry sheets.
6. If the weather is foul, walk your laps inside in the hallways. There’s no reason not to get your steps in by just walking the hallways among the decks. I love to start at the top and spiral my way down to the bottom. Everytime I see a new set of stairs, I take them and change direction. It keeps things interesting as I meander the hallways avoiding rain and wind.
7. Bring clips with magnets. You can get a cheap set of 4 from Amazon. Since the walls and doors of the rooms are metal, you can use these clips to hold up the daily schedule, pictures, notes, and even a sign you might make for your door. We love these clip magnets.
8. If you’re a shopper, go immediately to the spa and the shops once they open at the beginning of the cruise. They’ll have coupons good for the first day for specials. The shops are only open on sea days; use your coupons that you picked up on the first day that are no longer available during the cruise.
9. If you have an inside cabin where there’s no window, turn on your TV to the cruise view channel. You can see what it looks like outside without having to go outside. This saves you a trip to the decks to check what to wear.
10. The buffet lines get packed during your traditional eating times, especially for lunch. It’s noon, time to eat! Avoid the buffets right when they open and during the traditional lunch hour. Wait until 1:30 when things have cleared out and you won’t be stuck in lines and behind slowly moving people with their hands full. 

We love repositioning cruises because they give us plenty of sea days to get some writing done, work on our youtube videos, and meet new people. Planning ahead for sea days keeps us sane, on time, and patient!