Friday
Day 14 – Sea Day
As you can
imagine, we have very few television channels out in the middle of nowhere. The ship has a few channels that replay taped
versions of the various talks and lectures they have had onboard, as well as
advertisements for things they are selling in the ship’s store, and shore
excursions sponsored by the ship. One of
the channels we find most interesting is the channel that displays the current
weather, our exact position in the world, how many miles we’ve sailed, how many
miles to our next port, and other current nautical facts about our cruise. One piece of information it shows is the
depth of the ocean in our current location.
Since we have been in the South Pacific the sea depth beneath the ship
has been between 14,000 and 19,000 feet (which is three to five miles). A good incentive not to fall overboard!
Today is
our second Friday this week, which makes up for missing Tuesday a few days ago.
Crossing the International Dateline can be confusing. After breakfast it was
time for another of Travel Guide Julia’s talks on our upcoming ports, this
morning it was Bora Bora. Another great
presentation, and we are really looking forward to Bora Bora. After the Bora Bora talk it was time for
another lecture by Dr. Ken Longenecker, this time on the “Sex Lives of the Reef
Fishes”. This was a very interesting
talk about the reproduction process of the fish of the coral reefs we will be
seeing when we go snorkeling. It turns
out that seventy percent of the reef fish in the world change their gender
during their lifetimes and most of them change from female to male.
After the
lecture it was time for lunch, and then Val was off to Team Trivia and I finally
finished up the Fanning Island blog post.
Later in the afternoon we had another appointment with Future Cruise
Consultant, Annette to wrap up some details of our Inca Empire cruise next year.
We decided
to go to happy hour in the Crow’s Nest where we ran into Ken, Cathy, Mark and
Shirley so we joined them. We chatted
with them for a while and as we talked we saw an amazing sight. A large school of dolphins suddenly appeared
off to the side of the bow of the ship and swam alongside for a bit jumping in
and out of the water and treating everyone to a wonderful show. Soon it was time for everyone but us (early
seating for them) to go to dinner so we went back to our room. I decided to try my walk again today and this
time had more success as the decks were clean and polished and ready to
use. I managed to do two miles today,
but could really feel my inactivity in my legs.
Tonight was
a formal dress night, but before dinner we attended the evening show, which was
another production show by the Westerdam Singers and Dancers. The show was very good, as have been all the
shows we have attended. Before the show
started I was chatting with a lady sitting next to me who has been on
thirty-five cruises. This was their
first on Holland America and she said how surprised she was at how good the
entertainment was. We thought so to, but
we only have a couple of other cruises to compare it with. After the show we had another (need I say it
again) excellent dinner and then our usual visit to the casino. Val was back on track tonight and did pretty
well.
We have one
more sea day until Rarotonga. After
Rarotonga another sea day, and then we have a string of port days all in a row
as we sail to several different islands.
We were treated to another beautiful sunset this evening, and we were
almost late for the show watching it.
Val took some great pictures of the sunset, here are several of those.
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