1 October 2005:

Early morning:

At sea, between Iceland and Greenland near the Denmark Strait; rough dark water meeting grey, leaden skies; rain pelting the balcony windows, wind howling…..it’s pretty wonderful.

As you can tell, the Commodore worked up the huevos to finally get us away from the dock at Reykjavik sometime late last night or early this morning. I don’t know when we got away, but when I woke up around 2am the ship was moving. No word yet on when (or whether) we will get to Greenland.

Today is another sea day, no tours to meet, no early seminars or other things to pry us out of the cabin this morning so we are having a champagne breakfast in the room in a few minutes.

The cruise director wasn’t on the ship’s morning TV show this morning…..that isn’t too interesting…..the interesting part is that the reason he wasn’t on the show is because he was pulling ‘iceberg watch’ on the bridge. I find that somehow reassuring, that in this day of radar, sonar and satellite photos the last line of defense for a half billon dollar high tech ship is eyeballs on the horizon….although I would prefer the eyeballs to be a little less blood-shot and rum-soaked than those of the cruise director. 

Late morning:

Just for the record, I highly recommend the champagne breakfast. Drinking a bottle of champagne before 8:30am gives the morning a little glow, even if you can’t see the sun through all the clouds and rain. The seas are now classified as ‘moderate’ with waves at 7.5 feet and a strong wind coming at the bow. But things have definitely improved since last night. Just a quick note to those of you who have expressed concern about the high waves: Sure, calm seas would make for an easier voyage, but the rough water is kind of exciting as long as it doesn’t affect your appetite (if you know what I mean). So far, that has been my experience and for that I thank the modern pharmaceutical industry. Meclizine Hydrochloride is your friend. In rough water, one tablet, twice a day taken with liberal doses of grain spirits keeps Rickie Lee a happy camper….or sailor….at least so far. If that changes I will try to provide intimate details for your amusement.

Since it’s a sea day and since the weather out on deck is less than perfect, the public areas of the ship are pretty crowded. We did take refuge in the casino for a couple of hours this morning while our cabin was being cleaned. I was making progress on my retirement portfolio at the poker machine, but then I switched to another game that is kind of hard to describe…..you drop a quarter into a slot and it is flung to the back of the machine where it falls on a flat surface covered in coins and little sweeper arms push it into the other coins and it pushes some of the coins over the edge of a drop off to a second level where the process is repeated by other little sweeper arms shoving coins and bills and other little trinkets towards the edge where things finally fall into a collection tray……anything that falls in the tray is yours. It seems so simple….the flat surfaces are piled full of money…...huge stacks of coins are sticking out over the edge of the final precipice…just the slightest nudge should send piles and piles of money cascading over the abyss and into my greedy little hands……..but no! The damn contraption sucked up all my poker winnings. At this point the story should end, but Pam was watching me during the last few minutes that I was playing. She saw how trivially simple the game was and how close it was to disgorging hundreds of dollars if you could just nudge the pile a fraction of a millimeter. So, as I walked away from the machine she decided to try it….just a quick try….only a couple of quarters….she’d be up to the cabin in just a minute…..yeah right. Half an hour later she shows up; penniless. The machine has eaten her entire stash of quarters that she had built up so slowly and carefully over the last several nights at the blackjack machines. There must be a moral to this story, but I’m not sure yet what it is.

The weather has closed in a bit more now. The visibility is down to a couple of hundred yards, so the ship is blowing its fog horn every minute or so. It’s a low, lonely sound that for some reason makes me think of old 1940’s black and white movies….something with Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracey. Now that would be a great way to spend this cold, rainy afternoon: a bottle of wine and either ‘Casablanca’ or ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.

Late Afternoon:

Tonight we will not be dining with our usual tablemates. We are going to go to Tequila’s Steakhouse, one of the specialty restaurants onboard. More on that after we have the experience. Now might be a good time to mention our ‘usual tablemates’. We are doing traditional dining on this cruise, which means that we have a set table in a particular dining room at a set time with the same tablemates every evening….except when we choose to go somewhere else. On our last cruise we did ‘personal choice’ dining, which means that you go to a different dining room whenever you want and you are seated at any available table with whoever else happens to be there. But traditional dining has the advantage that you get to know the other people at the table very well over the course of the cruise and, if they are compatible, you can develop longer lasting friendships…..for example, we still exchange letters and card with two other couples that we ate dinner with on our Alaskan cruise over 10 years ago. But the key here is compatibility.

(Since not everyone shares my somewhat twisted sense of humor and since this is a public forum...I have deleted a few paragraphs here with references to specific individuals....sorry about that, but I don't want a lot of nasty emails from fellow cruisers)
  

The seas have deteriorated again and are now again classified as ‘very rough’; with 18 foot waves. They just came on the PA system a minute ago and announced that “due to gale force winds into the bow and rough seas” we have been slowed on our passage to Greenland. That coupled with “the approach of the iceberg limit and the need to slow our speed per the instructions of the iceberg pilot” means that the port call in Qaqortoq (pronounced: Cack-or-Tock) Greenland has been canceled….you have no idea how long it took me to learn to pronounce the damn place and now we won’t even be stopping there. As a consolation prize, we are going to do a ‘sail-by’ of the coast of Greenland tomorrow afternoon before heading back out into the North Atlantic on our way to St. Johns, Newfoundland. I’m a little disappointed that I can’t get credit for a Greenland landing, but there is the possibility of sighting icebergs on the sail-by. 

Anticipating a rough passage tonight, I have re-stocked the liquor cabinet…..a sailor must always be prepared.