Monday

At sea

4pm: The ship is now 3 degrees and 1 minute latitude north of the Equator; that’s 181 nautical miles and the ship is travelling at 18 nautical miles per hour; Although determining what time the ship will cross the Equator is complicated because the ship is not travelling due south; the ship’s course is 194 degrees, which is 14 degrees west of south; so the distance to travel x is solved by the equation 181 + y squared = x squared (where x is the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle) or by trigonometry (if I could remember whether I should use sin, cos or tan). I estimate I will move from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere about 3am Tuesday morning.

I’ve been having a quiet day (again) and have been moving around the ship with my Kindle finding comfortable places to sit and read. For the first time I sat on a deck chair on the Promenade Deck (deck 3) and read for an hour while the walkers powered (or not) past me doing their laps.

This morning I went to a presentation by the guy whose job it is to sign people up to another cruise before they have disembarked from this cruise. A woman came in late and asked a woman sitting in the row in front of me whether she could take the vacant seat next to the already seated woman. The seated woman said “no” because her husband was sitting in that seat. We’d been in the presentation for 30 minutes and the seat had been unoccupied the whole time. The late arrival then sat next to me. A few minutes later another woman came in and asked the same question. This time the answer was ‘yes’. The woman next to me very audibly said ‘bitch’ and there was no doubt the woman in front heard this comment as she visibly flinched.

There is lots of food to eat but getting something spicy is difficult as the dishes offered are generally bland so as to appeal to the majority of people and also the chefs know that the average passenger on this voyage isn’t likely to like chili or curry. But at lunchtime today there was a buffet on the pool deck (in addition to the vast indoor buffet, five course lunch in the main dining room and the pizza, tacos and burger bar). I had an excellent beef curry that had a lovely amount of heat which I extinguished with some beer while sitting by the pool (in the shade). It’s going to be hard to go back to having a sandwich at my desk for lunch.

One of the activities this afternoon is a game of hide and seek; with the crew hiding from the passengers. This is probably a game the crew wishes they could play at most hours of the day and night!