How to Keep Busy on Cruise Days at Sea

Most of the mainstream lines and the larger luxury ships provide an extensive schedule of activities throughout each day, especially during days when the ship isn't visiting a port. To keep track of the games, lessons, contests, classes, and so on, ships print a daily program, which is placed in your cabin while you're at dinner and applies to the next day. A cruise director and his or her staff are in charge of the action and do their best to make sure passengers are having a good time. As a general rule, the smaller the ship, the fewer the activities: Megaships tend to be a veritable hive of activity; midsize ships (like the Oceania trio and most ultraluxury ships) have a low-key roster of events sprinkled throughout the day; and the small-ship lines tend to shun organized activities entirely unless they involve the nature, culture, and history of the cruise destination.

Onboard Learning Opportunities

For years, lists of shipboard classes read as if they were lifted straight out of the Eisenhower-era home-entertainment playbook: napkin folding, vegetable carving, scarf tying, mixology, and the like. Old habits die hard, so you'll still find these kinds of things aboard many ships; however, over the past decade the cruise lines have finally started catching up to the modern world. Today, most megaships and midsize ships also offer informal lectures on subjects such as history, music, astronomy, health and wellness, personal investing, computers (word processing, digital photography, website design, and so on), and other topics. Don't expect to earn credits toward your college degree -- these are mostly hour-long sessions, and tend to be pretty basic -- but they make a nice addition to the day.

Many lines also feature cooking demonstrations and wine-tasting seminars, the former often resembling the kind you see on TV, complete with model kitchen and video monitors for an up-close view of the preparations. Wine tastings are usually conducted by the ship's sommeliers, though some lines bring aboard guest experts. There's usually a charge of about $5 to $15 for wine tastings, with selections coming from the dining room's wine list. Participants may be offered special prices if they care to order wine in advance for dinner.

Dance classes (most frequently salsa, country, and ballroom) are usually held several times a week, taught by one of the onboard entertainers. Staff from the gym, spa, and salon hold frequent seminars on health, beauty, and fitness, with topics including skin and hair care, detox for weight loss, and wrinkle reduction. These seminars are free, but they have an ulterior motive: getting you to sign up for not-so-cheap spa treatments or buy expensive beauty products. Just remember: You don't have to buy anything.

In general, the ultraluxury lines have more refined and interesting enrichment programs. Crystal's Creative Learning Institute (CLI), for example, includes some programs run in collaboration with well-known organizations, schools, and brands -- Berlitz for language classes, the Cleveland Clinic for health topics, and Yamaha for music classes, to name a few. Otherwise, lectures and classes focus on topics such as wine and food (for example, wine appreciation, spa cuisine), arts and entertainment (fashion design, language instruction), lifestyle (interior design, book clubs), wellness (CPR, tai chi), and business and technology. Cunard's Queen Mary 2 offers a similar program on its transatlantic crossings, developed in association with Oxford University and featuring talks on history, global politics, cultural trends, theater, science, music, literature, and more.

Onboard Games

Vacations promote mental health by allowing people to do things they wouldn't ever do at home -- for instance, participate in wacky poolside contests on days at sea. Almost all the mainstream lines continue this tradition, in which passengers compete to see who can do the best belly-flop, who has the hairiest back, or who can stuff the most Ping-Pong balls into their bathing suit. Sometimes passengers are teamed up for relay races that require members to pass bagels to one another with their teeth. Classic party lines like Costa offer frantic games like the Election of the Ideal Couple, where said couple is judged based on their ability to, for example, burst balloons with their butts. Even normally staid cruise lines let their hair down sometimes. At its weekly deck parties, Holland America sometimes features a team water-bottle relay in which one person chugs a bottle of water and then, as the line's printed instructions advise, "puts it in their swimsuit." The other team members each get a sponge, which they use to fill that bottle with ice water from a bucket on the other side of the deck.

Game shows, such as the Newlywed/Not-So-Newlywed Game, are always popular. Volunteer yourself or just listen to fellow passengers blurt out the truth about their personal lives -- just like on Oprah! Disney and Carnival often stage very realistic game-show games, with buzzers, contestant podiums, digital scorekeeping, and prizes.

If you're a performer at heart, volunteer for the weekly passenger talent show held aboard many ships. Among the more bizarre displays we've seen: an elderly lady aboard Norwegian Sun, wearing red hot pants and heels and lip-synching Shirley Temple's "On the Good Ship Lollipop." Gaming fans can sign up for trivia quizzes, do puzzles, or join chess, checkers, bridge, and backgammon tournaments.

Shipboard Casinos & Games of Chance

Almost every cruise ship has a casino, and as a general rule, the bigger the ship, the bigger and flashier its casino, with literally hundreds of slot machines and dozens of roulette, blackjack, poker, and craps tables. Luxury lines such as Regent and Seabourn have scaled-down versions. Stakes aboard most ships are relatively low, with maximum bets rarely exceeding $200. Average minimum bets at blackjack and poker tables are generally $5 or $10; the minimum at roulette is typically 50¢ or $1.

Most ships also have a card room, which is occasionally supervised by a full-time instructor. Most ships furnish cards for free, although some charge $1 or so per deck. Another time-honored shipboard tradition is horse racing, a very goofy activity in which toy horses mounted on poles are moved around a track by hand, based on rolls of the dice. Passengers bet on the outcome, and the end of the cruise features an "owner's cup" race and best-dressed-horse show.

Ships are free to allow gambling in international waters, but local laws almost always require onboard casinos to close down whenever a ship is in port. Big gamblers should keep this in mind when cruising to Bermuda, where ships stay in port for three whole days, with no gambling whatsoever during that period. Also, Hawaiian law prohibits casino gambling on ships sailing round-trip from the state, so there's no casino on NCL's Pride of America. In Alaska, where ships sail mostly in the protected waters of the Inside Passage, a dispensation allows their casinos to stay open except when they're within three miles of a port.

Children are not permitted to enter onboard casinos; the minimum age is generally 18 or 21.

Disney's two ships lack casinos due to Disney's essentially puritan nature. Most of the small ships and adventure cruises lack casinos because their passengers are too busy looking for whales.

Art Auctions

You'll find shipboard art auctions either a fun way to buy pictures for your living room or a seriously dubious and blatantly tacky way for the cruise lines to make more money by selling overpriced, marginally interesting, or just plain awful prints, lithographs, and animation cels to unsuspecting passengers -- not that we're taking sides, of course. The auctions are big business on mainstream and ultraluxury lines, held three or four times a week in one of the ship's lounges, for an hour or two at a time. The auctioneer (a salesman for an outside company that arranges the shows) begins with a talk about the hundreds of pieces spread around the room, and usually seems (to us at least) to give the impression these are rare and important works of original art -- which of course they're not. Generally they're prints, which is a fancy way of saying copies. Bid if you feel compelled, but we wouldn't. The one big plus about these auctions? Free champagne -- and they'll keep bringing it whether you bid or not. Just sign up and look interested.

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