Safety on board is paramount. We need to know what to do in cases of fire, man overboard, abandon ship, etc. I have heard rumours that were it not for the pandemic we would have had to have done some pre-expedition training in a pool with the life jackets and floatation suits. Instead we are given a series of safety briefings by Chief Mate Élio Figueiredo, who also gives refresher safety briefings to the able seamen (or ABs for short - a terrible initialism) every Sunday.

Before we set sail (apparently we still say that despite not having any sails) our first briefing was about life jackets, the different alarms and where to go in case of an emergency. We were timed to see how long it took to put on a life jacket - I thought I did that really quickly but I actually put it on incorrectly. We then formed a crocodile queue where we stand in a single line with one hand on the person in front’s shoulder - this is how we would move around the ship in an emergency and I’m not sure we did this properly. At the head of the crocodile, Élio would duck to simulate moving underneath some object. At that moment, everyone else crouched, rather than ducking one-by-one at the point of the imaginary object, which means that some of us would have stood up too soon and bumped our heads… Not a great start.

Our second safety briefing was about navigation, and how to control the ship in the unlikely case where all the sailors more qualified than us are incapacitated and we need to keep the ship on track. This is where the title of this post will finally make sense, for those who were wondering. Élio began by explaining that ships are traditionally female, even if they have a male name like Mário. This is because, like ladies, ships have a mind of their own. As such, steering the ship is like a tango, where the man leads and compensates for the lady’s movements (I don’t know anything about dancing but this is the metaphor that was used). Mário is a classic, sexy ship with a proper wheel-shaped helm rather than a modern joystick, and thus the title has been explained. Élio then demonstrated the tango-with-a-sexy-lady-with-a-man’s-name by turning the wheel 10 degrees to port. After straightening up to mid-ship, Mário kept turning to port slightly, like the fickle woman she is, so Élio had to compensate by turning a few degrees to starboard. All that was missing was the music.

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