Friday, 2 August

When we woke up at 06:00, the ship was slowly making its way out of the Halifax harbor.  At 07:30 it seemed to have reached the end of the channel and turned almost due east.  At that point I used my iPhone compass app to find our location.  We were at 44-35-10 N, and 63-55-31 W.  My intention was to chart our position at roughly 12-hour intervals until we reached Liverpool, and then perhaps plot the entire passage.  

One of the Second Officers told me that we would be traveling at approximately 18 knots across the ocean, so I thought I might try a variation of the Pythagorean Theorem with the latitudes and longitudes to see how accurately I could compute our daily speed.  Spoiler alert: I couldn't do it.  I guess I'm just not that talented. 

At breakfast we met all of our new fellow passengers.  In addition to Roland and Wilke, we now had a Scottish couple (David and Ruth) who occupied the cabin on one side of Ellen and me, a Swiss fellow (Chris) who occupied the cabin on the other side of us, a Dutch fellow (Hans) and his American wife (Ann), and a French fellow from Toulouse (Sebastian). So there were 10 of us in all.

Despite the romantic notion of traveling on a cargo ship, the fact is that it is a small, cloistered environment and there are things that should be taken into account.  I know this from some loosely analogous personal experiences: I crossed oceans twice on U.S. Navy ships (long before the Internet). Once I crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea (from Norfolk, VA to Beirut, Lebanon and back).  And once I crossed the Pacific and Indian Oceans (from San Diego, CA to Somalia and the Persian Gulf and back).  

In these sorts of environments, it is important to have a routine.  At least for me it is.  I have found that it is all too easy to wander about with no structure, and eventually end up with cabin fever.  As Melville said in "Moby Dick":

“…passengers get sea-sick – grow quarrelsome – don’t sleep of nights – do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing…”

There’s not much one can do about sea-sickness, but a routine is one way to help mitigate the rest of that.  In my case, I decided to structure my days something like this:

06:00 – Wake up, make coffee, and organize my thoughts; maybe step outside with my coffee to enjoy the passage at sea

07:30 – Take a shower, etc.

08:00 – Breakfast

09:00 – Write (I had a number of writing projects to keep me busy)

10:15 – Stretch, walk, and exercise with the free weights

11:30 – Listen to podcasts

12:30 – Lunch

13:30 – Nap

14:00 – Sit outside with some reading material (I had plenty) and enjoy the passage at sea

15:45 – Practice flute

16:30 – Walk

17:00 – Hang out with Ellen and review the day

17:30 – Dinner  

18:30 – Enjoy evening at sea outside

20:00 – Play cards with Ellen; perhaps watch some of the videos that Ellen had downloaded and brought with her.

22:00 – Lights out

Of course there would be variations depending on the weather and a few other factors.  For example, on that particular day we were in a thick fog bank during the afternoon and well into the evening, and it wasn’t very pleasant sitting outside.  Furthermore, some crew members were painting the decks, which meant that broad areas outside were blocked off.  So hanging around outside enjoying the passage at sea was pretty much a non-starter.

(And I hope it’s obvious that much of that -- such as enjoying the passage at sea -- would be with Ellen).

Before the additional six passengers arrived, I had been practicing my flute every day in the passengers’ lounge. I could no longer count on that, because the other passengers might be in there.  I thought I might practice in the exercise room, but the acoustics were terrible. And then I had an idea: the sauna.

The sauna was buried deep in the interior of the A deck.  There were no cabins or work spaces around it.  Plus, the wooden walls would absorb sound pretty well, giving it relatively good acoustics.  In the absence of anyone telling me otherwise, then, I decided the sauna would be my flute practice space.

Of note, Hans and Ann had found two additional folding deck chairs. Now there were three.  And the rumor was that there were two more somewhere.  That was still too few for 10 passengers, and I wished we had had the wherewithal to have brought two for ourselves from the start.  

After dinner all the passengers gathered in the passengers’ lounge, drank some wine, and got to know one another better.

At 20:15 we were at 45-3-53 N, 56-1-46 W.  At 18 knots we should have covered about 229 nautical miles.  Also, we advanced the clocks an hour, and we were now in the same time zone as Nuuk, Greenland.

Sunset at sea