Tuesday

At sea

Last night the entertainment in the main theatre was “Bill Pinkney’s Original Drifters”; that much qualifying of a name makes it seem like there might be more than one lot of Drifters drifting around the entertainment circuit and that there have been arguments about who has greater claim to the name Drifters. Certainly one of the members looked old enough to have been singing at the time The Drifters were singing hits; he looked old enough to have been singing in the 1920s and this is probably why he got such an enthusiastic reception from the audience; he made them look all very young. None of the four members of the group made any reference to actually being in the original (lower case) Drifters. And they didn’t sing anything that struck me as being a Drifters hit from the 50s or 60s.

[Later: as I suspected, a minute on Google revealed that the 60 plus people who have sung with various incarnations of the Drifters have spent as much time suing each other as they have singing. There was even litigation about the trademark granted to one group]

Afterwards I went out on the front deck beneath the bridge which is kept very dark at night so the person steering the boat can see where he is going; although at the moment there isn’t much to run into day or night. After standing in the dark for ten minutes my eyes were acclimatised to the dark and the stars were very bright in the sky. I saw half a dozen shooting stars in 15 minutes.

I slept through the crossing of the Equator; which happened at 2.44am (my estimate yesterday was 3am). This morning we are sailing through the South Pacific. We also crossed the International Date Line yesterday but as we then recross it today our day remained unchanged. We officially cross it between Samoa and Fiji and completely miss out on Friday 12 October; we go to bed Thursday night and wake up on Saturday morning. I look forward to the inevitable confusion this will cause, although most of the passengers look like they now don’t know what day of the week it is now, so the change may not make so much difference.

This morning I was passing a few hours sitting in a deck chair on Deck 3 and reading when I heard people saying loudly ‘look, look’; jumping out of the water as they swam alongside the ship were about 100 dolphins. After a couple of minutes they veered away from the ship and all the passengers on the deck just stared at them until they disappeared from sight. I didn’t have a camera with me and anyway a photo wouldn’t have conveyed the sight and the experience adequately.

The rest of the day was passed by reading and wandering around the ship.

Today I’ve seen a considerable number of people in the library looking at atlases, trying to find American Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia; or maybe even Australia!