Trapped on a floating prison with a thousand drunken fanatics. Are we having fun yet?

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Getting naked with hundreds of people you've never met might sound like a good idea. But it turns out to be kind of awkward and uncomfortable. Especially when it's 10 a.m. and you're stone-cold sober on the deck of a cruise ship somewhere in the Atlantic.

The nudity itself isn't the real problem. It's the lead-up. When you know that you're about to expose your private bits to the world, all sorts of paranoid thoughts flash through your head. You wonder if maybe you're the only one stupid enough to actually go through with this. A strong breeze off the ocean has an amazing ability to circumvent even the most tightly secured bathrobe and find its way to your genitals. If you're a guy, this can have an adverse effect on the size of your business. Which is distressing if you're planning to share it with complete strangers anytime soon. You consider slipping a hand inside your robe, just to give a gentle tug to make sure you're "show ready." But there are too many snooping eyes. We're not just here to get naked; we're here to have our photo taken. In a way, this has a calming effect on the crowd. It makes us feel a little less vulnerable. We're convinced that if we choose our placement wisely, our frightened reproductive organs will be obscured, just another pink blur in a vast panorama of naked flesh.

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We're convinced that if we choose our placement wisely, our frightened reproductive organs will be obscured, just another pink blur in a vast panorama of naked fleshIt's only day two of Ships & Dip, a five-day "rock cruise" headlined by Canadian popsmiths the Barenaked Ladies, and I'm already about to do something I know I'll regret. Not in a fun way or a "that was such a crazy trip, man" sort of way, but in a haunting, traumatizing way that could take years of therapy to undo. They tell me the nude portrait was the band's idea. It started out on last year's cruise, when they invited guests to join them for a photo themed on the "barenaked" part of their name. To the band's surprise, hundreds of passengers showed up. This year, not counting me, there are 953 would-be nudists on the deck.

The sea air is filled with nervous tittering. From what I can gather, the mob is made up of equal parts men and women, young and old, physically semi-attractive and the reason why civilization insists on clothing. More than a few look like characters from a Tolkien novel. None have bodies that are complimented by direct sunlight. The most repeated phrase of the hour is, "I can't believe I'm doing this," followed by a nasal Fran Drescher laugh. There's a very loud man a few rows ahead of me who's pretending to be helpful: "When you pick up your bathrobe after the shoot, please bend with your knees!" he reminds us.

A photographer perched on a ladder above us orders the crowd to disrobe, and we do so, in unison. There's a lot of cheering and hooting. I don't see much naked flesh, other than the clenched butt cheeks of the people standing directly in front of me, and a woman who has draped her breasts over a guardrail, like a pair of tube socks filled with gravy.

"One more second for safety," the photographer bellows, snapping frantically. "One more for safety, one more for safety ..."

My gaze drifts toward the ship's bow, and I contemplate jumping overboard and swimming for shore. It's probably suicide, but at this point, it seems like a reasonable option.