World Cruise Day 13/152 - another sea day, wildlife spotting and trivia failure

Cruise day: 13/152
Ports days: 4
Sea days: 9
Countries: 4
Continents: 1
Ports: 4

Today, January 5, 2022, found us in the third of four consecutive sea days en route to Cabo San Lucas.  The seas are much calmer now that we are out of the Gulf of Tehuantepec.  Cruise Critic member, Heidi13 commented on my last post indicating that the seas we saw yesterday were actually typical of the Gulf of Tehuantepec.  Now that we are north of there, we should have much more favorable conditions.

We spent a fair amount of time on the balcony today reading and watching for sea life.

We spotted our cabin steward, John, working hard a couple of cabins down.  They squeegee the glass every day to ensure that guests get the best possible view from the veranda.

When you're sailing in saltwater, salt gets deposited on everything as the spray dries.  Here's a look at the rail on our balcony.  This was wiped clean yesterday. All that white is salt left behind from evaporated sea spray.

As we sat on the balcony, we saw multiple turtles.  Today, they all seemed to be just below the surface of the water.  When you consider that turtles lay eggs on the beach and that we are 20-40 miles off the coast, it's pretty impressive that these little guys are hanging out way out here.

We saw dolphins again, but this time, they were just below the surface and not good photo targets.  Arlona spotted another "dolphin", but then it popped its head up, it was actually a seal. It popped its head under as I grabbed the camera.

It did present a nice tail shot for me.

There were also a ton of the small flying fish flitting about today, and of course, that meant more boobies that seemed to enjoy snagging them out of the air for a light snack.  No photos, but really fun to watch.

As I mentioned yesterday, the Pacific is big - really big.  There's a lot of fuss about plastics and such fouling the ocean.  Seriously - with the size of the Pacific, aren't these people all alarmists making a big deal about nothing?  Unfortunately, no.

When you consider the enormous size of the Pacific and the relatively infinitesimally small size of our ship, you'd think that any excess garbage would never be seen.  Well, that's not the case.  In the past several days, I've seen multiple plastic bottles floating by as well as someone's sandal yesterday.  I don't know what this was, but there it was, just floating by the ship.  We need to seriously stop throwing garbage into the ocean.

We continued to learn the subtleties of bidding in our bridge lesson today. Trivia was brutal - worse than yesterday.  The winning team only managed 9/15 correct answers. Us?  4.  What country has a flag that features a sinking ship?  Turns out it's Bermuda. At least we learned something.

In the Captain's noon announcement, good news - three people have been released from isolation.  Woo!  But...another crew member tested positive for COVID and is isolated, plus there were a couple more close contacts moved into protective quarantine.  In our opinion, Viking is doing an excellent job diligently testing and identifying any COVID cases as well as close contacts and is taking appropriate steps to isolated and quarantine as indicated.  There is no "spread" per se and the situation is well-managed.

This afternoon, we took a walk on the promenade deck for about 30 minutes.  We stopped to take a photo with a senior officer who was overseeing some maintenance work.

We enjoyed a pre-dinner cocktail in the Explorers' Bar.

We also enjoyed watching a beautiful sunset through their floor-to-ceiling windows.

At dinner, we were joined by Jim & Nancy.  We had met them a few nights earlier and found out he hailed from Muskegon, Michigan, where Arlona grew up.  They attended the same junior high and high school, though a few years apart.  They are very nice to chat with and we enjoyed our evening with them.

Tomorrow - one more sea day and then, Cabo San Lucas.