Day 60: At Sea … Coral Sea

Tuesday, 7 March 2017
At Sea — Coral Sea

Stats @ Ship’s Time 9:15p (AEST) … UTC 11:15a (7 March)
Temp: 82F (27.8C)
Position: 21.54.81S / 150.49.443E

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
~ GK Chesterton ~

A really nice day at sea … very relaxing … no apparent fumes, although my scratchy throat would beg to differ.  I spent the first part of the morning posting a couple of stories from Australia to the blog.  With the internet cooperating it went quite smoothly.

The mid-segment muster drill was today — hard to believe it’s been two weeks since we left Auckland.  As with the other non-embarkation day drills, we were excused from going out to the lifeboats.

After the drill, back to the veranda for more writing and photo processing to take advantage of the reasonable-to-good internet speed.  I had time to do some reading, too.  I skipped lunch in lieu of a salad Mui brought me from the Terrace Café … smart move not to fill up on food since we had another RTW dinner event tonight.

I spent a portion of the afternoon working on logistics for Komodo Island.  Have to admit that there was a moment or two when I wondered why on earth I took the lead for organizing this tour.  Oh yeah … I didn’t want to have to book a ship’s tour to go in search of the dragons.  Anyway, I wrote up the meeting instructions for the 30 or so people who have signed up to join us on this private tour.  Mui and I will deliver them to each participating couple tomorrow.

We received and completed our Australian OPCs today.  What are those?  They are the mandatory Outgoing Passengers Cards … every passenger must complete one prior to leaving the country.  O pre-printed some of the information, leaving a few fields for us to fill in, sign the cards, and return them to Guest Relations.  We were given until noon on 9 March to do so.  That’s the day we will be in Cairns, which promises to be a busy day for us, so Mui turned them in today.

Now it’s time to get ready for the special dinner … I’ll wrap up later.

2nd RTW Dinner …

This time we were assigned to the Polo Grill … table 17.  When we arrived a few minutes before the appointed time of 6:45p, we found a couple of people waiting in the lobby for the restaurant doors to open … Captain Luca and GM Yves amongst them.  We’ve chatted with the captain only in passing.  He surprised us by referring to that conversation and asking Mui a question about something we mentioned back then.  Nice of him to remember us.

We had a nice table for the event.  We had not previously met the two other couples sharing our table, so this was a nice opportunity to get to know them.  Our host was Boyan Vasilev, Insignia’s Environmental Officer, who came aboard in Papeete.  We met him at the recent RTW Coffee when he participated in the deck officer panel.  I recall him mentioning during the Q&A that he would like to be captain someday … and Captain Luca responding that it wasn’t going to happen on this cruise ;-)))  Soft spoken; dry sense of humor; charming host who made sure no one felt left out of the conversation topics.  Chef Farid put together a nice menu — everyone agreed it was better than the menu at the previous event.

All in all, a very nice evening to wrap up a very nice day at sea.

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