At Sea

Despite the Commodore’s warning there doesn’t seem to have been too much movement last night. However, it is still raining, and the Commodore described the swell as “confused”. The ship is pitching and rolling, but sitting here in the Commodore Club it is perfect, although there are no waves breaking over the bow.

Watching it rain outside, one cannot but help wondering why it bothers to rain over the ocean, when the rain would do so much good if it fell over areas of the world where they need rain.

The talks today were very interesting – Chris Frame gave an excellent lecture on “The First Cunard Liners”. I have been to many, many talks on the history of Cunard, but I learn something new at each talk, and he is a great speaker. David Burgess talked about “Tahiti Evokes Visions of Paradise”. I agree, Tahiti certainly is paradise. The talk was about the history and culture of the island, and was very informative. With the overcast skies and rough seas I was missing the sunshine and beaches there already.

I embarked on a new craft project today, a velvet evening bag. I love my current clutch evening bag, but I tend to leave it all over the ship, and this one has a shoulder strap. This should stop the visits to the pursers’ office in the evening. Last night I left my bag in the cabin, so it was lost even before we started our evening.

The Commodore announced that we would be continuing with bad weather and heavy swells. He reassured us again that the ship was built for this kind of weather and we were all safe. I wonder if Mr. Complainer from yesterday had asked him to turn the ship around and go back to Auckland.

We met up with Keith and Ann for pre dinner drinks in the Commodore Club. The ship really was moving by then, and we had to hold onto our glasses and the snack dishes to prevent them plummeting to the floor.

We had dinner with them at the Lido Specialty Dining Aztec restaurant. The meal was really great – the best of the specialty dining we have done so far. Seeing as the food was Mexican themed I had a Margarita which was good, but Brian makes better ones. The tortillas were really tasty, freshly made just the way I like them. There was also quite a bit of pitching and rolling there, and the wine bottle nearly fell off the table. The weather seems to be getting worse.

After dinner we headed to the Golden Lion for the quiz on human body trivia. The 4 of us felt very confident that we would win, but as usual there were some very obscure questions, and some that were quite inaccurate. We only scored 18 out of 20, as did 2 other teams so we had to participate in the tiebreaker, and we came in 2nd – the tiebreaker question was when was the first heart transplant performed. We had thought it was 1968, but it was actually 1967. So we were close. Our prize for coming in 2nd was a bottle of Contessa sparkling wine. Could there be something even nastier than Pol Acker? We decided to drink it at dinner tomorrow night, so we will find out.

The show tonight was a Queen tribute band, the Bohemians. Nobody could ever be as wonderful as Freddie Mercury, but they did a good job. I sang along when they did “We are the Champions” because we did win a bottle of sparkling wine.

Back in the cabin we made preparations for another rough night at sea. The bungee cords have come in handy again – I will not mock Brian for bringing them along.