Day 35: At Sea … Still Heading to American Samoa

Thursday, 9 February 2017
At Sea — South Pacific Ocean

Stats @ Ship’s Time 7:45p (SST) … UTC 6:45a (10 February)
Temp: 84.6F (29.2C)
Position: 14.53.95S / 167.23.54W

Too often … I would hear men boast of the miles covered
that day, rarely of what they had seen.
~ Louis L’Amour ~

For the first time since we began cruising in 1999, I can honestly say that I did not have a good day at sea.  It wasn’t the overcast sky or the slight motion of the ocean that made the day less-than pleasant.  Rather, it was the diesel fumes that seemed to permeate the ship … though it was much better in the forward sections of the ship than it was at the stern … and dissipated quite a bit as the day wore on.

The problem started last night.  With the wind coming from the starboard, the smoke from Insignia’s smokestack was being blown in from the aft.  I can only guess that a design flaw of the R class ships allows the fumes in as the only other time we have experienced this problem in 17 years of cruising — but not to this degree — was on Oceania’s Nautica in 2015.  It got so bad at one point last night that we even had to open the cabin door to get some “fresher” air from the hallway to flush out the fumes from the cabin.

My throat is downright raw now, and nothing seems to soothe it.  We have had the ventilation system in our cabin re-adjusted so that we can shut off the fan, and things seem to be improving now.  Fingers crossed for a good night’s rest.

I did go out this morning to do my walk, so that part of my sea day routine went well.  And a good thing I did that early as at some point later in the day, the outside decks were closed due to the strength and direction of the wind.

Today we had the fourth muster drill of the voyage … we’re becoming experts.  The Captain excused us from going out to the lifeboats because of “bad weather” … read that as strong winds.  So the drill took up less time than it does on segment start days.

Since there’s not much to write about today, I’m going to share some information about how I compose my blog posts.  The question was posed in a comment left on a recent post by Mary, one of the readers of this blog.  I replied to her comment, but thought others might find the information useful as well — though I highly encourage blog writers to keep it “simpler” than I do.  I’m also going to add a few words here in response to Mary’s follow-up comment re: blogging on an iPad.

I compose my blog posts using Open Live Writer (OLW — download here) … which was Microsoft Live Writer until Microsoft gave up supporting it.  In my opinion it is the best offline blog editor in the blogosphere.  So much so that I even partitioned my MacBook Air in order to install Win10 so I can use it …. the downside of OLW is that it is not available for OSX.

I especially like that OLW has a regular text editor page where I can write the post like I would with any word processing software, but it’s possible to flip over to another page to see the html text that actually gets uploaded.

I type the text (or copy/paste from the journal) and then get links to my SmugMug-hosted online photos and insert them into the content in OLW where I want them to show.  It’s for these links that I am glad I have the capability to switch to html.  Of course, it's possible to insert pictures directly from the computer … in which case the html tab would not be used.

Then, when I am ready, or when I have internet, I publish the post to the blog.

In her follow-up comment, Mary mentioned that any live blogging that she might do would be done on an iPad.  That being the case, OLW would be a moot point.  She also mentioned using the Blogger app, noting that she didn’t much care for it.

I toyed with blogging on the iPad … even got a case with a built-in keyboard.  I tested one or two blog apps — including Blogo, which was the best of the bunch (not sure if it's still a viable app).  In the end, none of them really “did it” for me.  Admittedly, I am very picky about how the blog gets formatted, so my experience is not a good gauge for blogging using an iPad.

And that, as they say, is a wrap.  Hopefully I will have a better tale to tell tomorrow.

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