5 October 2005:

The waves are moderate, the wind is high and once again there is no land in sight.

The day opened clear and sunny. Low clouds moved in by mid-morning turning the sun into an off-white disk in a grey sky. The cloud cover continued to drift lower and to thicken until now we are surrounded by fog and the sun is completely obscured. The ship’s fog horn is back in operation, so its low moan punctuates the afternoon.

It occurs to me that the wind will always be high on this cruise. In the Caribbean or the Mediterranean you are sailing a short distance each day….maybe less than a hundred miles, seldom more than a couple of hundred. But this is a longer voyage. We’ve already sailed nearly 4300 miles, we still have a long way to go and we got behind schedule with the rough weather early in the cruise. So, when the weather permits, Commodore Girly-Man is putting the pedal to the metal to make up for lost time. As a result, even with a ‘calm’ wind we would still have 20-25 knot winds just from the motion of the vessel. And the winds are not calm, they are coming at the bow of the ship at 20-30 knots so we have an effective wind on deck of anywhere from 30-50 knots. Maybe after we get to New York and change our heading from westerly to southerly we won’t be getting quite so much wind…..assuming we don’t run into the remnants of Hurricane Tammy. I think that hitting the left-over weather from 2 hurricanes in a single cruise would be over doing it a little.

You notice how so much of these messages are talking about weather. I really didn’t intend for that to be the case, but it just seems to happen. For some reason, when you’re on a boat that’s what you think about. Conversations with strangers at breakfast and lunch always include what the weather has been and what the forecast is. For all the attention paid to the weather you would think that we were all a bunch long-line fishermen sailing out of Gloucester for 30 days of chasing swordfish off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland; instead of a gaggle of pampered passengers eagerly waiting for the buffet line to open while traveling on a giant boat being operated by a trained, professional crew of over 1000.

Nothing very interesting was happening today. We walked the decks for a while early in the morning when the sun was still out. We attended the finals of a trivia competition. It was just like playing the trivial pursuit parlor game….if you had a really big parlor. We had a group lunch with a bunch of people who belong to the Cruise Critics bulletin board. We sat at a table with a couple from New England. The man is a TV Weatherman on the local NBC affiliate in Providence. He and his wife did 95% of the talking, but it was interesting. They told us stories of their previous cruises and he kept doing ‘sound effect’ noises to go alone with the narrative.       

I did manage to recover from the damage done to my retirement portfolio by that infernal sweeping machine (see my earlier message titled “At Sea”). I was playing the poker machine after lunch and was just a dollar or two ahead when Fortune smiled on me for a few brief minutes and in the space of just 5 hands I managed to get 4 Jacks, 4 Tens, a Straight and a Flush. I decided that it wouldn’t be good to push my luck further so I cashed out and went to visit the finest, most fascinating and most charming person on the ship; Joey, the bartender in the Casino Bar. Joey introduced me to the Ocean Breeze; a delightful mix of vodka, blue Curacao, sweet and sour mix and pineapple juice.

At the moment we are sailing off Nova Scotia, we are almost to Halifax. If the fog wasn’t here I might even be able to see the coast. I just looked out the balcony, and the fog has REALLY closed in. Before you could see 75-100 yards out, now you can barely see any water at all. Everything is white. Just from looking out the window and from feeling the motion I can’t tell if I’m in a plane or a boat. The thing that gives it away, and tells me I’m on a boat, is that some jerk isn’t reclining his seat into my knees.