Spring Break Cruise Day 1: Pigs & Strawberries

Being surrounded by college students all the time isn’t all bad. You get to learn all the great new texting abbreviations, for example, and you are never behind on the latest plotlines on “Outer Banks” or “Love Is Blind.” And if you need to know where to illegally download music, movies, or morally repulsive pornography, well, I’m engulfed in resident experts.

But the best thing I learned from my undergraduate friends up here was this: You can go to Acapulco, Cancun, Panama City, or Key West, but the REAL new spring break trend isn’t to be found anywhere on land. It’s the good, new-fashioned Spring Break Cruise.

Armed with this knowledge, I suggested to a friend of mine that perhaps after doing South Beach for 8 years, we try this new fad in spring-breaking. And after much arm-twisting and thorough convincing, he agreed to come with me on a five-day odyssey through the open seas. And thus, friends, began my adventure.

Educating The Youth Of America

For those unfamiliar, cruise lines are not so big on allowing you to bring alcohol on board. As a matter of fact, they forbid it. But of course, where there's a will, there is a way. Anyone who likes to drink their body weight in vodka knows full well the best way around this is to buy some large bottles of water, dump them out in the Publix parking lot, get a funnel, and fill those Zephyrhills babies up with the finest charcoal filtered crap you can find.

And so we did. And so I sat out the driver’s side of my car at a Publix, funneling Bacardi and Skyy into bottles as soccer moms and their kids walked by with quizzical looks on their faces. Someday, that kid will go on a Spring Break cruise, and when his buddies are trying to figure out how to get booze on board, he’ll think back to that guy in the Saturn at the Publix when he was a kid. And the circle will be unbroken.

I Am The Strawberry Man

I was a little hungry before we left for the port, and so I decided, for some odd reason, to get a basket of strawberries to munch on on my way up the gangplank. Of course, I didn’t finish all of them by the time I actually got on board, so I ended up walking around the main pool deck looking like some sort of weirdo who had a thing for strawberries.

But let me tell you, on a cruise where there are an abundance of college-age girls, but an equal abundance of college-age guys, anything that makes you stand out is to your benefit. And so I walked around offering strawberries to whoever wanted them, male or female. Many accepted, and for the rest of the cruise wherever I went around I was known as “Strawberry Guy.” Yeah, pretty gay, I know. But this was not the Fire Island Cruise, so like I said, anything that sets you apart is good to go.

Would A Gay Man Spend All Of Dinner Staring At Your Chest?

After circulating the pool deck and getting an idea of what kinds of girls were on the boat (spring breakers, big surprise), we attended the mandatory lifeboat drill. Now I’m not sure what, exactly, collecting 200 people in a theater and showing them how to put on a lifejacket is going to accomplish should the boat start heading towards the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, but I guess Liberian registration law requires that they do this.

So we all sit through it, cocktails in hand, and effectively learn how to put one end of a clip into another. Actually, some of the Florida State girls seemed a little confused by this, but that was to be expected.

So my friend and I quickly cracked open our first bottle of “Spring Water” and mixed up a nice vodka sprite as a pre-dinner beverage. Now, those of you who have been on a cruise know that normally when you go you have an assigned dinner time and an assigned dinner table with a bunch of total strangers.

And while this is usually the case, someone over at the cruise line must have thought that we were on our honeymoon because for some reason we got one of the few tables for two in the entire dining room. So first I’m “Strawberry Guy”, and now me and another dude have a romantic, candlelit table in the corner. At this point, I told my friend we should go up and do Madonna covers at the after-dinner karaoke.

But wouldn’t it be our luck that on either side of our romantic table sat some fantastic scenery? One was a table full of girls from Florida State (never met an ugly one from there), and at the other sat a family of five. This would not be so exciting except that the mother had a chest that appeared to cost more than the entire family’s cruise and was a fan of low-cut dresses. I chose the seat with the view of her, while my friend got to ogle the coeds.

Like Tanking An Interview For A Job You Didn’t Want

Throughout dinner we exchanged glances with both tables, but after polishing off a flat iron steak and some chocolate dessert that I vaguely recalled, it was time to head over to karaoke. At the karaoke club onboard, we somehow managed to seat ourselves next to a group of girls from Duke. Now if you’ve ever been to Duke, you know that while the school excels at academics and basketball, one thing it does not boast a lot of is hot girls. I mean, there may be one or two, but you tell someone you’re going to hang out with a bunch of Duke girls, and you’re basically saying, “Don’t be too impressed.”

This group was no exception. But, while stuck on a boat and on spring break, well, we can overlook small details like sub-par appearances. We chatted with them for a little while, heckled one of them as she suffered through some 20-year-old Bon Jovi song, then the group of us adjourned to the real “dance club” upstairs.

Cruise ship dance clubs are not exactly the highlight of the boat. Most of the time, if you head up there you find yourself sitting at a table while about five people dance very poorly to 3-year-old hip hop music while sucking down watered-down drinks. But during spring break, there are actually a good contingency of young people, and therefore the club is somewhat less pathetic. It actually becomes uncomfortably crowded, and you find yourself shuffling around through spilled liquor and broken glass, still listening to ^{3-year-old hip hop}.

I began chatting up one of our Duke girls as my friend went off with another to the dance floor. I’m not sure exactly what he said to her, or what he did, but he came back by himself about fifteen minutes later, looking a little perturbed.

“Your friend…” he said to my Duke girl. He then leaned into my ear and yelled, “Is a f-king whore!”

I’m not sure if in his drunken state he thought that by directing his scream right into my eardrum that it would then become inaudible to the girl I was standing 2 feet away from. But, sadly, he was wrong. Duke girls, if nothing else, are pretty smart. So with that, my girl took a bit of offense and called us both a string of profane names that are not fit for a family site such as this. They were Duke girls, though, we didn’t care.

Falling On The Grenade

And God bless spring break, because within five minutes we were talking to a pair of girls from George Mason, or James Madison, or Old Dominion, or some other perennial 16-seed located on the Potomac River. One had a great body but had a face that reminded me of Orson from U.S. Acres. The other had a body that reminded me of Orson from U.S. Acres, and that, my friend, was not something I was prepared to deal with on a boat full of drunk college girls.

We talked with them for a little while, and at some point, it was suggested we head back to our room for some Zephyrhills and Sprite.

In any situation where two guys are talking to a pair of girls, and one is, shall we say, not particularly attractive, it is imperative that one of them volunteers to “fall on the grenade.” For those not familiar with the somewhat dehumanizing term, it means one of the guys is going to have to hook up with the ugly girl so his friend can get the hot one. Or at least the one with the good body and the porcine face.

And so it was that my good friend had to be the sacrificial lamb this night. We got back to the room, had a few drinks, and started making out. The girl I was with seemed particularly eager to get down to business and suggested we move into the bathroom so as to leave the other couple alone. I had no objections to this.

After a romantic, candlelit, deeply-connected 15 minutes in the bathroom, my date for the evening and I emerged to find our friends completely clothed and sitting on the bed. Apparently, my friend was willing to pick up the grenade, but not willing to jump on it full-force. Well, good for him. Now I owed him one.

We bid our dates good night and went to sleep so we could be up in time for our 7 a.m. shuttle boat.

That was day 1. Stay tuned next week for day 2.

‍Editor’s Note: Originally published April 07, 2008. Updated in 2026 with new photography; Matt Meltzer’s original writing remains unchanged.