Sunday, 4 August

I finally saw the sunrise.  When I got up at 06:00 we were about halfway into morning nautical twilight and the sky all around was crystal clear.  So I made coffee quickly and went topside to see the rosy-fingered dawn unfold.  As with yesterday afternoon’s top side reverie, sunrise at sea is one of the things that makes being out there so great.  On the one hand, it’s not too terribly different from watching the sunrise at an Atlantic beach.  On the other hand, there's a world of difference when you're standing in the middle of an ocean -- the horizon stretching forever in all directions -- and watching the day begin.  Again, this is really one of those things that makes being at sea so great.

At 07:30 we were at 46-54-41 N and 43-34-56 W.  Roughly speaking, we are about 34 nautical miles farther north than we were last night. And if we have been traveling at 18 knots, we’ve gone about 860 nautical miles.

There were signs all over the ship saying that English was the working language, but in reality it was like that bar scene in the first “Star Wars” movie.  The Master was Bulgarian, as were the First Officer and the CHENG.  The chef was Russian, the electrician was Ukrainian, most of the crew was Filipino (and there were the three British maritime cadets).

So yes, lots of things got said in English.  But the Filipinos spoke Tagalog with one another, and the Bulgarians spoke Bulgarian with one another.  You could see that there were some challenging exchanges when the Master, for instance, was trying to say something outside of the norm to one of the Second Officers.

I thought it was probably more than just a coincidence that the Master, the First Officer, and the CHENG were all Bulgarian.  One of the passengers (who happened to speak Bulgarian) had a discussion with the First Officer, and the First Officer apparently said that the Grimaldi/ACL line only hires Bulgarians and Polish officers for the top three slots.  One piece of this equation is that both Bulgaria and Poland have excellent maritime academies.  I also inferred that if the top three were from the same country, then communications about the state of the ship were probably clearer and more accurate.

We had a surprise at lunch: ice cream.  Apparently Sunday is ice cream day, and the passengers all got a goblet with two giant scoops of vanilla ice cream.

Although the day began nice and clear, a marine layer developed after lunch.  By that I mean a low overcast that took up the entire sky in all directions came in.  It was kind of cool because it had variable depth, which meant that the sunlight penetrated it more in some places and less in others.  This created a shades-of-gray patterned effect on the sea.

At about 17:00 Ellen noticed a sea gull flying over and around the ship.  I went outside for a better view, and it appeared there was land to the north.  Greenland?  I asked our cabin neighbor, David (a former merchant seaman) to come take a look and give me his opinion.  He said that if we were seeing any land at this point, we were way off course.

Seagull

(Photo by Sebastien)

Despite David's thoughts on the matter, at a certain point Sebastien started getting a network signal.  So who knows?

After dinner most of the passengers converged extemporaneously in the passengers’ lounge, and we started drinking some of that wine the Master had sold us.  It was fun starting to hear peoples’ stories now that we had all gotten to know each other better.  This went on until about 23:00 pm, with different people drifting in and out.