Holiday in Transition # 12: All at Sea

The “middle passage” of this cruise is made up of six long days at sea – as good a way as I know to recapture the feel of the old days.  You know, when people travelled to other continents by sea (not air), the shipping companies blissfully advertised that “getting there is half the fun” and the passengers roundly cursed the shipping companies as a pack of lying, scheming vultures.

Years ago, an Australian exchange student in one of my classes defined a Canadian thus:  “A Canadian is a person who always talks about the weather first, and eats peanut butter and banana sandwiches.”

We Canadians have been right at home in this phase of the trip.  On sea days, everyone talks about the weather first.  And when the going gets rough, it sometimes feels as if a peanut butter and banana sandwich is the only thing sticky enough to make your stomach settle down and behave itself.

We’ve been through a couple of rough sea days.  Just one picture is quite enough to put you in the picture.

As the captain apologetically said yesterday, “After all, this is the North Atlantic and it is December.”  I’m just grateful that it didn’t get bad enough for them to start stringing hand-ropes across the larger public rooms on board.  This morning, though, things have calmed down a lot and I’m sitting post-breakfast on my balcony, watching the sun light up some clouds, and enjoying the fresh sea breeze.

So I thought I would do a top ten list of things I’ve learned or re-learned in the last 48 hours.

THE TOP 10 REASONS YOU KNOW YOU’RE SAILING IN ROUGH WEATHER

[10]      The outdoor decks are all closed off, including the all-important walking and jogging track.

[9]        The spray is flying past your eighth-deck balcony and coating your sliding glass door.

[8]        The clouds and horizon are doing the shimmy and the waves are doing the twist.

[7]        You curse the clouds, the horizon, and the waves for not getting their act together.

[6]        The dining room suddenly becomes much more popular, since the staff carry everything.

[5]        The pool is drained right to the bottom.  Three-quarters of the drainage is by sloshing.

[4]        The ship’s store is cleaned out of Gravol and pressure bands.

[3]        People stop arguing about whether Gravol works better than pressure bands, or vice versa.

[2]        You get up at 3:00 in the morning to figure out which closet/drawer is banging open and shut.

AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON YOU KNOW YOU’RE SAILING IN ROUGH WEATHER…

[1]        The only people walking in a straight line are the drunks.

But now for the good news.  Yesterday, at the cocktail party for returning guests of Princess, I won the door prize draw: a bottle of sparkling California wine.  Guess what got shared around the table at dinner afterwards!

Last night, with the ship still heaving and lurching unpredictably, the staff captain wanted to cancel the production show in the cabaret.  The singers and dancers were adamant that the show must go on.  They took out a few of the wilder lifts, throws, and spins, but otherwise we got the show in its entirety.  And for the whole of that 45 minute performance, I was completely unaware of any motions the ship was making.  Now, that’s a really impressive example of professional dedication!

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A FOOTNOTE:  December 16, 2015

I just wanted to add a couple more quick observations and a couple of even better pictures.  This is our last sea day before Bermuda, and although the waves have been worse on other days this is definitely the windiest day yet.  But, like yesterday, it's sunny and 22 degrees Celsius so pretty nice on the sheltered deck around the pool.  The top deck with the walking/jogging track is closed because of wind speeds (gusts over 80 km/hour).

Another spectacular performance from the singers and dancers last night, again flinging themselves into their routines at full throttle and figuratively thumbing their noses at their pitching and heaving stage.  I got a chuckle this morning as I watched several of them picking their way over the deck by the pool as gingerly as any of their much more senior audiences!

This morning the bow of the ship was flinging some of the biggest clouds of spray yet as we piled into the waves, and I caught a couple of them from my eighth-deck balcony.  Hard for me to estimate the height of the waves from that upper level but I would guess that the swells are running average 12-15 feet with the bigger ones getting up to 20 feet.  

I've also discovered that the ocean is a communist dictatorship.  How else to explain the behaviour demonstrated in this picture?

No matter how much the pool tries to keep all the water on Deck 9 to itself, the ocean brutally and heartlessly causes the ship to heave and pitch, forcing the pool to share of its wealth with the water-deprived deck all around.  If that isn't "communism" at its best, I'd like to know what is!