Day 16 - Thursday Jan 12 at Sea day 2

Day 15 photos

position at 7:15 am: N22:49:23 latitude W123:57:23 longitude
(about 2400 miles NW of Nuku-Hiva, Marquesas Islands, our next port)
temperature: 65F and 84% humidity
distance since FLL: 5778 miles
blackjack status: +$22.50

We gained an hour last night which makes for an active ship early in the morning. At 5am, there were 2 people in the club.com, the computer lab. By 5:45, there were 3 or 4 four people walking on the deck 12. By 6:30, there were a dozen people. In the gym, there were 4 treadmills being used, two bike machines and one person using a weight machine. Way too much activity.... Many of the chairs in the public spaces are filled and lots of people are just milling about in all the halls and public spaces. We did not see this on the first segment, at all. Either there were more sunbathers or people just kept to their cabins more. Debbie has found herself having to fight for space in the aerobics room for classes this segment. (Not in her nature, and not happy to have to do it or miss out entirely!) This morning there were 30 people in stretching and another dozen were turned away. Bebi had lots of space available with not many people attending classes. Jackie who will be the fitness instructor for the rest of the World Cruise is very popular; it seems, or else the people that were only on for the last 2 weeks segment weren't as worried about missing a class and the people on now are. The ship seems much more crowded now than it did on the last segment and we know that the ship was quite full last segment with lots of cabins completely filled with families with their children. There are still lots of children on board for the full world cruise, but they are all new children from the Panama Canal segment. Last night at the block party we met the woman 2 doors aft who is on the full world cruise to home school 2 children who are on with their parents. Lucky kids! Lucky teacher!

There was an opportunity at 10am for people who did not receive their complimentary parkas in LA to get one and for people to swap sizes if needed. It was apparently a free-for-all madhouse. One woman described it as a rummage sale competition. Clay was there early with Debbie's coat to meet her to try to get a smaller one. He could see it would be nearly impossible because everyone wanted a smaller one. He was near a man who wanted a larger one and he swapped Debbie's Medium for a Small and brought it to the aerobics room before Debbie ever left class to meet him. The S is a perfect fit. Clay commented that Debbie's M would have fit him and he had ordered and received an XXL. RSSC did send an RSVP form months ago to say if you would come to the LA hotel and dinner and also what size Timberland jacket you needed with the warning that if you weren't sure to order a size larger. We did visit the Timberland website but we did not have any information on which jacket's size chart to use and they were different with some running larger or smaller.
Lunch by the pool was a Fruehschoppen, a traditional Bavarian lunch with brats, weisswurst, saurkraut, spatzle and more. They served Warsteiner beer on tap. Accordinging to Debbie, it was the best lunch yet. Clay thought it was good too. Bob liked the beer.

We have been invited to eat at Staff Captain Daniel Green's table tonight at 7:15 in the Compass Rose. The staff captain is 2nd in command. Tonight's menu is the same as the 2nd night menu from the FLL-LA segment.

Our meal at the Staff captain's table was good. In addition to the staff captain we had the social hostess, Dionne Lochner. There was a total of 8 people at the table. All the passengers at the table had gotten on in Ft. Lauderdale and the Daniel and Dionne had gotten on in LA and were still suffering jet lag. Daniel had come from Sweden and Dionne from South Africa. There were two other couples who had done several world cruises with Raddison.

Something we did not mentioned from the pre-WC segment is a fight (that's right, a fight) in the Compass Rose restaurant one night toward the end of the FLL-LA segment. We were sitting on the starboard side of the dining room. On the port side, directly opposite us, we heard a baby crying away, ear-splitting shrieks about every 6 seconds and just generally making a lot of noise. There were several loud attempts by random passengers to get the baby to quit (or to the parents to remove the suffering child!). This went on for 15-20 minutes. Then there was a lot of commotion on the port side of the room. A crowd was on their feet and tables and chairs were pushed aside. A code blue call went out which we think generally means a passenger down. From what we have heard, a man sitting close to the table with the crying baby finally took extreme offense at the noise and attacked. This eventually lead to blows being thrown between the father and the offended passenger. During the altercation, a female passenger sitting close by took a blow and was knocked to the floor. Needless to say, this disrupted the dining room for a while.

In our room after dinner was a note from the Captain apologizing about some information that was printed in an travel article in the Jan 8 NY Times. It said that world cruisers were getting free internet. The captain said that was misinformation. The free internet was to be part of the new Seven Seas Society benefits. For world cruisers, Radisson was offering a special rate.

Internet RatesJust to document it, here are the posted internet rates on the Voyager at this time:
250 minutes for $50 ($.20 per minute)
100 minutes for $25 ($.25 per minute)
pay as you go - $.35 per minute
World cruisers were offered a one-time package of 10,000 minutes for $600.00 ($.06 per minute)

Day 15 photos