Day 40 - Monday Feb 6 at Sea

Day 40 photos

position at 7:35 am: S38:56:32 latitude E143:20:41 longitude
temperature: 63F, 80% humidity, partly cloudy
distance since FLL: 14,003 miles

We are sailing under Australia in the Indian Ocean and the wind is really blowing from the port side. The TV has shown steady wind speeds of between 90 and 120 KM/H. (But in Freddie's Noon weather report, be put the winds at 30-40 mph. Whatever the speed was, the winds were howling.) The wind is whistling through our balcony door and there is an occasional moan from somewhere in the room (and not from Debbie or Clay, at least not early in the day!). It could be all those koalas doing it. Bob has had a tough day. He was being pitched from his perch, by and above the bed, repeatedly. Debbie finally took pity on him and relocated him between the clock and a paperback book. The clock had been pitched at least once earlier in the day, so Clay suggested that Bob get some assistance from one of the magnet/clipper koalas who were uselessly occupying the wall, but Debbie intervened in Clay's continuing mistreatment and humiliation of Bob.

Debbie went to another of Jackies' winnowing-early cruise aerobics classes and skipped Pilates for Complete Beginners. At about 10am she was sitting on the bed talking to Clay, who had his foot up on the headboard, when we entered this weather system. It was like a curtain was pulled across the window or like the ship passed through a door into another weather system. Just like that! Suddenly all howling wind and blowing rain, and then in a few minutes the rain was gone, but the wind and a sea full of nothing but big breaking whitecaps was visible. It is also only about 60 degrees. There is a blast of it coming through the upper left corner of the center of the balcony doors. It is creepy. Debbie put on a Relief Band and made it through lunch, when many around us did not. As we stood to leave, the waiter rushed to push our chairs in for us and we were trying to use them to stabilize ourselves. Debbie told him, "Let us just take a minute to get our legs." The man sitting behind us, whose dining companion had fled about 5 minutes earlier, piped up with "Take 2, dear." It was amusing, but we literally could not control where we were going, the ship was rocking this way and that so fast and so far. We made it down the hall into the atrium, up the stairs and got in a line for meclizine at Reception. (They parse those things out each time to you like you are begging for methadone, or something else you might abuse!) Debbie got upstairs and went to bed. Clay watched the new theater-release movie of "Pride and Prejudice" on TV.

It is Informal night. We decided to go casual and try the new Pasta e Basta menu in LaVeranda. We really liked it. We both had tomato soup, then Clay had ink pasta with jumbo prawns in pesto and Debbie had angel hair pasta in sundried tomato pesto with grilled chicken breast. We pretty much skipped dessert because the motion up there was really bad. The waiter even pitched over on to our table at one point and just held himself there until he could regain his equilibrium. Tonight was the 2nd night of "The Outback" in Latitudes. Don't know if we wrote about this before. But, all the chairs had been kicked out of there and had been lined up in groups like orphans at odd spots all over the ship. It was comical and sad for the lovely chairs. Today, at lunch we got a glipse into the newly redecorated Latitudes (we have a reservation for Wednesday night) and it is a gas. It was also smelly, that can't be intentional. They have plastic chairs in there now, like you might get for a backyard deck table at Wal-mart. (Maybe that is were the smell was coming from, new plastic?) They had something that looked like leaves all over the floor, which did not make sense. Tonight in LaVeranda the waitresses from Latitudes were there at LaVeranda, in training. They had been in Latitudes all along, even dressed as Polynesians, for that special period. Anyway, they said they had been booted too. They only wanted boys down there. She said she would have worn the fake mustache, shorts and boots and hat. Debbie agreed with her, that it was not right. And if anyone was going to wear a fake mustache it would be sillier on girls than boys and that they should have left the waitresses alone. (Debbie feels badly enough about all those dispersed and forlorn orphaned chairs!)

Don't know if we wrote about this before either, but we apparently have an artist onboard. Someone with the initials BU, or BM, who writes dates with the day first then the month. Anyway, this person is making sketches and they are being photocopied and delivered to our beds at night. We now have 3. View of a ferry and the Sydney Opera House, view of the pool deck in the Bass Straits and one that the artist could not have seen (?) Voyager sailing from Sydney to Melbourne. These are very nice, but we don't know anything about who is drawing them or about them being shared with us.

The wind has died down to about 35km/h and the whitecaps have subsided to be replaced by big swells. Our speed all day has held at about 17-18 knots all day. They say that we will still be in Adelaide on schedule even with the delayed departure from Melbourne and the rough water and high winds. It is early to bed for us. Tomorrow is Adelaide and a predicted high of 77 degrees. It will be a big change from today if that prediction is correct. Looking forward to another day on land in any event.

Day 40 photos