At Sea

February 5^th, 2025

The cloudy, hot, muggy weather persists as we head towards the Gulf of Guinea at a snail’s pace, Still, life is fun on board and the champagne continues to flow.

Out reconstructed elephant (it fell apart during a move) still graces our suite, and all in all the space is getting rather cluttered with the accumulation of treasures over the past 68 days. In a bold move I discarded all of the menus we had been given, If I take them home with us I will only read them over and over again, and regret how disappointing our meals at home are, so it is best that they do not make the journey with us. I still have all of the daily programs, the Herald, but I will be strong and discard them too if the pile keeps on falling over and half of them end up on the floor. Such is life.

Even with the new influx of guests, the casino remains deserted. I feel sorry for the casino manager. He is always there waiting for someone to join him. I wave and smile as I walk past him every time we go to the Club. He doesn’t even have a book to read. It must be a very boring job. We are picking up more guests in the Canaries, and then the ship will be full, hopefully some of the new folks will keep him company.

There are many reasons for us to go to the Club, and today there was a new one. Wheel of Fortune. John is test driving a new game of skill on us. We couldn’t work out how on earth you could play Wheel of Fortune without a wheel and a fortune to be won.

John said that maybe Wheel of Fortune wasn’t the best name for it. He was right, it was like a cross between Wheel of Fortune and Hang Man, and although it does need to be tweaked, it was great fun.

The idea is that you are in teams of 8. That was easy for us, 2 of the members of our trivia team didn’t join us so we were a team of 8.

There were 8 teams in all, we were team number 5.

We were handed sheets of paper with the blank spaces, and we had to fill out the letters to spell the movie, person, or phrases on the paper. You got to choose 2 consonants and if they were correct, you got to guess the answer. If you got it wrong, or didn’t choose the correct letters, John moved to the next group and asked them to guess 2 consonants and then if answer if the consonants were correct, and so it went. When a team guessed the answer, they scored a point, and we moved on to the next puzzle.

The problem with 8 teams is that if you are in team 8 and guessed the answer when it was team 2’s turn, you had to wait until it was your turn before you could shout out the answer. So teams 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 would have to get it wrong if you were to have a chance to score a point. It was meant to all even out in the end, but one team was NOT happy with this, and complained bitterly.

John pointed out that he was just trying out the concept to see if this would be a fun activity, but they were having none of that. I really appreciated that he was trying to be inventive and keep us occupied during the long and plentiful sea days.

After the Wheel of Fortune, it was time to get ready for dinner and then we stopped off at the Observation Bar for sundowners. The sky looked like it was bright red, but hiding behind a bank of clouds.

The crisps were plentiful, so I was happy!

With several restaurants to choose from, it is sometimes difficult to decide where to go for dinner. Brian thought they had crispy soft-shell crab at Earth and Ocean which is outdoors by the pool on deck 8.

I love eating there as the menu is always very inventive, and if the weather is good, it is lovely to dine outdoors.

The weather tonight was perfect, warm but not too hot and humid, and no wind. We sat down and perused the menu. No soft-shell crab. We thought it would look rude to get up and find another restaurant, so we decided to order an appetizer and their delicious baked camembert (which would be the perfect meal for myself), and relocated to the real soft-shell crab location, the Colonnade restaurant.

This worked out very well, and after the camembert we moved to the terrace at the Colonnade where we sat listening to the wake below us, and consumed some soft shell crab. It had been a perfect dinner. I love the variety of food that is available, it really is impressive on such a small ship.

When we returned to our room there was a letter reminding us about the small risk of pirate activity in the Gulf of Guinea and what measures we should take in case we did come under attack. It does seem fairly unlikely that we would come under attack as a cruise ship. But has a cruise ship ever been attacked in the Gulf? I checked this out on my computer. I found an article from March of 2024 which stated that the Gulf of Guinea remains a hotbed for piracy. Even though piracy in the Gulf has decreased in the last few years, from 81 incidents in 2020, to 35 incidents in 2021, and 19 incidents in 2022, it is now on the rise again, with 22 incidents in 2023. However, there was no mention of cruise ships, so hopefully we will be safe.

We decided to skip the show and have a movie night in our suite. On most ships the TV is fixed to the wall and it is quite a challenge to get behind it to insert an HDMI cable so you can watch a movie that is on your lap top. Well on the Sojourn the TVs are very conveniently placed on a tray that is mobile, and the TVs can swivel to either face the bed or the sitting area, so watching a movie that is on your computer on the TV from the comfort of your suite is easy to set up. Just as long as you remember to bring your HDMI cable, which by some miracle we did.

The sea continues to be very calm. It hardly feels like we are on a ship, I do miss the rock and roll of the ship in a good swell. Maybe things will improve. Although this is as long as a Transatlantic crossing, it certainly lacks the sense of excitement of a good storm on a crossing. But then again as much as I love Southampton or New York, the idea of going to Benin certainly piques my interest.