Today we continued our crossing and by early evening we were South of Bermuda. The influence of Bermuda is noticeable on our crossing as the island has instigated a 200 miles no fishery zone around the island and also they have a 30 mile – no-pass-by-zone, if you do not call at a Bermudian port. The latter zone is meant to avoid inadvertent groundings and thus pollution from ships that do not need not to be close to Bermuda anyway. Our course took us 75 miles south of the island, so well away from the exclusion zone.

The weather continues to be good. However ahead of us is a low pressure system moving to the South East and dissipating. The uncertainty with this sort of system is always how fast it will dissipate as that is very difficult to predict. So in the course of the evening the ships movement which had thus far been near zero, began to change and a gentle pitching became noticeable. If the NOAA weather prediction is correct, then it should not get worse apart from some showers in the next 36 hours, and that would mean that we should have a real good crossing.

Life on board goes its quiet way, with lectures, activities, cocktails, dinners and shows. Thus far we have had lectures about literature and ocean life. Also very popular are the cooking classes by our chefs. During our fleet wide Signature of Excellence upgrade, a kitchen was built in the ships movie theatre. Here our Executive Chef, 2nd Chef or the Chef from the Pinnacle restaurant (our specialty restaurant on board) give cooking demonstrations and also cooking classes. In the past the movie theatre was only used in the morning for church services and in the afternoon for movies. Now the non-utilized time in between is filled with cooking and it is a huge success. If you look at the daily program, it looks quite comical by having the Pope at 9am, the Chef at 10am and Brad Pitt at 2pm.

The atmosphere on board differs greatly from a regular cruise that has a port each day. On port intensive cruises the focus of our guests is fully on the excitement that each port brings and shipboard life is shaped around that perception. Now with so many sea days in a row, the tempo slows down and guests have time to enjoy all the amenities that the ship has to offer, and each other’s company.