Grand Africa Cruise - Sea Day

Cruise Day 47

Friday, November 25, 2022

“Let the sea breeze blow your hair, let the sunset bring tranquility to your heart, let the distant places you travel allow you to explore yourself.”  -- Somya Kedia

Today is a very, very welcome sea day.  After being very busy the last six days, we were ready to take it easy and stayed in bed until nine.  After getting ready and having breakfast in the Neptune Lounge, we headed off to the Crow’s Nest for our second Cruise Critic Roll Call Meet and Greet.  The reason there is a second one is because some people on the roll call joined the cruise in Cape Town.

When we went to the first Meet and Greet at the beginning of the cruise, we didn’t really know anyone, but we have gotten to know lots of people and this time it was more interesting.

After the Meet and Greet there was another slot pull so we headed off to that.  I believe there were around 28 people who each put in $16.  Each person gets five spins on the slot machine and the wins are accumulated to be divided up among everyone at the end.  The extra dollar everyone pays goes into a pool that is awarded to the person who earns the most money.

The first time we did a slot pull at the beginning of the cruise, we broke even and got our money back.  This time we were not so lucky, but we did get $9 back so for a $7 investment we had some fun and excitement.  Val and I were both lucky and both earned more than the $16 we put in on our slot pulls, but unfortunately others weren’t so lucky.

Val takes her turn.

During the slot pull the captain came on for his daily noon update with the news that tomorrow’s port stop in Luderitz, Namibia is cancelled.  It is a tender port and he said that there were high winds predicted and it would lead to rough seas that would make tendering too dangerous.  We are already noticing the windy conditions as the sea is very choppy and there are white caps on the waves.  The ship is not rocking and rolling too badly, but it is certainly rougher than what we have experienced so far on the cruise.  The temperature has also dropped making it a bit too cool to relax on our balcony.

The wind was blowing and the seas were definitely getting a little rougher.

After the slot pull, it was off to the Lido for lunch.  This was our first lunch in the Lido since before we left the ship in Maputo.  After lunch, it was back to our room, and I started to work on the blog.

I have a lot of the blog to catch up on as while we were on safari, I didn’t bring a computer and I had to hand write my notes.  Now I need to start writing everything up.  It will be fun to relive our adventure, but also a lot of work.

More importantly, without a computer we were unable to download any of our pictures we took so I came back with quite a few memory cards full of photos to download onto my computer, and organize them.   We haven't even looked at them yet so we are really looking forward to that.

I didn’t get much done on the blog, but I did get our photos downloaded and organized and we spent a couple of hours in the Neptune Lounge looking at them.  Just to show you how many pictures we took, we barely made it past looking at the photos our first game drive in one sitting so we’ll be continuing to look at pictures for the next few days.

We relaxed until dinner and did our usual evening routine finishing up it the casino.  We had some luck tonight and stayed longer than usual so when we got back to our room it was time to call it a night.