At Sea

December 11^th, 2024

I stopped by Seabourn Square while Brian was at breakfast. I had forgotten what a lovely place it was. There were people there drinking coffee, reading, chatting, staring out to sea, and doing puzzles. It had a great relaxed atmosphere. There were also a lot of open seats.

The ship is sailing just over half full at the moment. That doesn’t mean that it feels empty and deserted, 230 people feel like just the right number. We will be sailing full from Cape Town at the end of the month. It is going to be interesting to see what it feels like then. Meanwhile I was enjoying the lack of crowds and spent a couple of hours in Seabourn Square.

We had missed the previous bridge tour but were able to join the tour today.

We had recently been on the bridges of 2 brand new ships, Explora 1 and Queen Anne, I was looking forward to seeing how the bridge of a ship launched in 2010 compared to the new builds.

Well unlike Explora 1 there was no garlic or evil eyes on the bridge, but there were loads of well cared for plants and a cute bear.

I was interested to learn that although we have bow thrusters, we don’t have stern thrusters. The propellers apparently act like stern thrusters, but I was wondering if the lack of stern thrusters was why we had issues docking in Praia.

Anyway it was a great tour, and we saw how we had had to change course to avoid a cargo ship in our path.

Although they don’t use the signal flags anymore, I was pleased to see that they still had them on board. I think it’s a shame that we don’t fly a Blue Peter when we are in port to warn crew and passengers that we will be sailing soon. It’s like no longer blowing the whistle half an hour before we sail to warn everyone to leave the pubs and head back to the ship. I have great memories of those days. Now we must hope that our Apple watches are in the right time zone in order to get us back to the ship in time for all aboard.

They can also communicate by morse code if needed, but they haven’t needed to so far.

The officers had a team at trivia today, and again we did better than them. In fact, we did quite well, our best showing so far.

After lunch our team headed to the Colonnade for lunch.

The weather was perfect, and it was lovely to sit watching the wake below us.

I live in hope that one day we will be invited to dine at the captain’s table. Every evening, I return to our suite and look for that much sought after invitation. My parents always seemed to be sitting at the captain’s table, we have only done that once, and that was on Queen Elizabeth back in 2012.

Well last night when we returned to our suite there wasn’t an invitation from the captain, but there was one to dine with Chris the shore excursion man. Well, that works for me!

As it turned out our friends had been invited as well, as were a lovely couple from New Zealand which whom we had talked previously.

It was a very pleasant evening. Chris was a gracious host, and I enjoyed getting to know more about him personally, and how on earth his department manages to organize tours in the remote ports which we will be visiting. They really do an amazing job under ever changing conditions.

After dinner we went to listen to the guitarist Greg Rodman. He opened with Classical Gas, one of my favorites from my guitar playing days. I always wanted to sound just like Mason Williams. Of course, I never did. But it is still one of my favorite pieces of guitar music.

The show was good, a great ending to another perfect sea day.