Wednesday, 31 July

The night had been fitful for both Ellen and me.  We had both kept waking up throughout the night.  And even though it had been easy to get back to sleep, it was a bit annoying.  The one redeeming thing was that at 02:00 I stepped outside and the sky was absolutely ablaze in stars.

Breakfast was the same as yesterday in terms of the food offerings.  What was interesting, though, was that the steward told us the wine store was open, and we could buy bottles of Italian white or red for 10 euro apiece, and that we would be allowed to drink wine in our cabins or in the passengers’ lounge area.  Also, the Master was going to provide (at no cost) some red or white wine for lunch and dinner, and then again lunch the next day.  So we had to make a choice for all three meals right then -- at breakfast -- because the Master needed to radio ahead to Halifax for replenishments.  Or at least that’s how I understood it.

Also during breakfast, one of the Second Officers informed us that we would be advancing the clocks that night at 18:00 to be on Halifax time.  He also said that we should be arriving in Halifax Thursday evening (the next day) at about 18:00, and we were supposed to be pulling out of Halifax at 03:00 on Friday.  That meant that we were actually a bit ahead of the published schedule.  I asked him what that meant in terms of arriving in Hamburg.  He said he would guess we'd arrive sometime on 11 August.  Whether that was entirely accurate or not wasn’t important; what was important was that there was no indication of arriving in Hamburg excessively late, which in turn meant that our hotel and car reservations were probably OK.

After breakfast we went out to the port deck area, and realized that we could do some walking there.  The deck was about 60 yards long, so 15 laps would be about a mile.  

Port deck looking forward 

Port deck looking aft

Walking on the deck out in fresh air beat the hell out of walking on a treadmill, and so we each walked about a mile.

(I know what you're thinking: "Rick, what the hell is that yellow rectangle with all the red dots?"  I will get to that in a few more posts.)

  

Lunch was one of the better meals at that point.  Another good broth soup, this time with chicken and white beans in it.  Lunch proper was a good beef stew with mashed potatoes and a cucumber salad on the side.  Plus, a little bottle of wine, courtesy of the Master.

The ship was heading due north, so in the hours after lunch neither side of the ship was very shady.  But the deck department was painting the port side, thus we had to go over to the starboard side for fresh air.  Our shipmate Wilke had somehow found a folding chair, and he was lounging in the shade of an exhaust fan reading.  Ellen and I sat in the shade of another exhaust fan a bit more forward, and just mused at the sound of the waves, the gentle breeze, and the never changing horizon.

While we were sitting there we noticed that the ship kept passing some things that appeared to be floating in the water.  They were definitely in a pattern, so we deduced we couldn't be too far from shore.  Later we learned that they were, in fact, buoys of some sort used for fishing (or lobstering).

Fishing buoys

After an hour or so of that we both decided to clock in another mile of walking.  Again, since the port deck was being painted, we used the starboard deck.  This was a bit different from the port deck in several ways.  Since the ship generally loaded and unloaded from the starboard side, this was the "working" side.  It had a lot of equipment and containers and whatnot.  It also had several doors to cabins.  One cabin, it turned out, was the jail (it even had bars on the window).  That's where they would jail people if the need arose.  Another cabin was the Suez Cabin.  Apparently when a ship goes through the Suez Canal some sort of pilot needs to ride it.  And apparently the shipping company does not want these pilots staying inside the ship.  So he or she has a cabin that opens out onto the starboard deck -- with no access to the interior of the ship -- and from there they can walk up the outside ladder to the bridge when necessary.

Starboard deck looking forward 

Starboard deck looking aft

Dinner was some sort of poultry breast and wing, along with pasta and potatoes plus a lettuce and carrot salad.  Again, we had some white wine courtesy of the Master.

Yesterday evening we noticed a somewhat foul smell in the hallway outside our cabins.  It had disappeared by the time we woke up today, so we didn’t pay it any mind.  But later in the day it came back with a vengeance.  It took me a while to recognize it, but I finally did: it smelled like raw sewage.  I guessed that a pipe was leaking or backed up somewhere.  The smell was only in our little corner of B deck.  As it had persisted all day, after dinner I asked the steward to come up from the galley and smell it.  He agreed it was foul.  A little while later he informed me that he had told the Chief Engineer and the Master, and that they were checking it out.

We went topside before turning in for the night to watch the sunset. 

If you hang around sailors enough, you will hear of the “green flash.”  Sometimes -- just as the sun disappears below the horizon at sea -- there is a brilliant green flash.  In the 12 months at sea that I spent in the Navy, I saw it once.  I would not call it a life changing event, but it’s kind of cool.  I was hoping we could catch it on this little cruise, but there were too many clouds on the horizon that evening.