07 October 2011; At Sea.

Today we had the first of our two sea days. Late last evening we passed the Norwegian Pearl which was trundling along with a speed of 12 knots on her way to Vera Cruz (near Puerto Caldera) in Costa Rica.  You can do the stretch from Puerto Quetzal to there in one night if you make 23 knots but most ships do not go that fast, nor want to face the fuel cost and thus opt for a sea day in between. We have two sea days as we have to travel a distance of 889 miles to get to the Balboa seabuoy. Our course is taking us in one straight line down to the border of Costa Rica and Panama and we can do that because the land is veering away from us here.  Last night we kept a distance of approx. 5 miles to the coast, today we were more than 65 miles away and that remained so until late afternoon when the coast was coming closer again. In the meantime we passed the borders of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.  Due to the strange twist in the continent here, some of these countries have large parts of the land connected to the ocean and some only a few miles.

For some time there was talk about building a 2^nd canal through Nicaragua, which is wider than Panama but has on the Eastern side a large natural lake that would reduce the cost of digging.  The Japanese were very interested for a while but it more or less blew over. Now with the Panama Canal being widened so much and the new locks being built, I do not think that a second canal would ever be constructed.

We had a lot of wildlife around us today. We saw one or two tuna shoals, cavorting porpoises doing back flips and  we were escorted for most of the day by brown boobies and one masked booby who were circling around the bow, drifting on the upward wind flow caused by the bow. That gave the quartermasters something to look at while they were standing their watches, as on this stretch of ocean there is not much to see. Very little shipping and until we come closer to land again no fishing boats either.

On a seaday there is time for drills and inspections. So we had our weekly firedrill and there are the never ending series of shipboard inspections to see if everything is shipshape and/or if there is room for improvement.  These inspections now take place under the cover name of HESS. (Health Environmental Safety Security) I have written about it before; that the company embraced a few years ago the philosophy that things are normally not stand alone items but most of the time interconnected. In the past we did Health Only inspections, Safety Only Inspections, now we take a more holistic view of a situation and see it in the complete operational context.  Makes sense of course and it has the great advantage that it becomes everybody’s responsibility and requires everybody’s involvement and bypasses that great option of everyone trying to “delegate” it to somebody else.

Some of these inspections I do alone, some of them are done by the ships staff together, which has the additional benefit that an issue can be discussed and resolved on the spot. Those sort of things keep me happily occupied for most of a sea day as my required presence on the bridge is at a minimum. I check in a few times a day to see if we are still going the right way, if the speed/engine settings are at optimum and if the navigators are doing what I want them to do, but for the rest a regular sea day with good weather is spent by me inside the ship. On top of that are the numerous parties that are going on, either organized by the ship as part of our product or by groups of travel agents on board.

Some travel companies have reps sailing with a group and then these reps throw one or two cocktails parties and I normally get an invitation as well.  Then there are groups such as Cruise Critics who announce themselves to each other on their chat boards and if there are sufficient of them on one cruise, they organize parties or get togethers among themselves.

Tomorrow will be another restful day at sea and then we will be going through the Panama Canal. The weather is still holding with very little wind but there is an increase in showers during the night and early morning but it all helps to keep the temperatures down.

For you viewing pleasure. A rather dramatic photo taken by our hotelmanager Bert of one of the local thunderstorms recently.