World Cruise Day 12/152 - the sea - she is angry...

Cruise day: 12/152
Ports days: 4
Sea days: 8
Countries: 4
Continents: 1
Ports: 4

Wowzers!  Last night was amazing, and not necessarily in a good way.  We both woke up in the middle of the night to a loud bang - like the ship hit something.  The walls in our room shook.  The boat was a-rockin'!  And what we hit was water and a lot of it in the form of huge waves.

The Captain clarified this morning around 9 AM with a special announcement - we were facing 10 to 15-foot waves and breezes gusting up to 35 knots. Toto, I don't think we're in the Atlantic anymore!

Cruising the Pacific is a whole different experience than cruising the Atlantic.  Sure, the Atlantic can get rough at times, but for most of the lower portions, it is relatively calm most of the time.  The Pacific, at twice the size of the Atlantic and covering about 33% of the Earth's surface is huge.  With huge comes lots of water and with lots of water comes waves and wind. To understand how huge it is, the surface area of the Pacific Ocean is larger than the surface area of all the land on Earth combined.

But, those waves can also yield subtle beauty as evidenced by the fleeting rainbows that appeared in the morning light as the waves broke off the starboard side of the ship.

The skies were pleasant, but the waves told another story.

To get a sense of how much the ship was pitching, I went up to deck 7 and took a seat.  Aiming the camera at a steady point, I took two photos of the horizon, when it appeared at its highest above the handrail as well as at its lowest.  Because it was hard to see through the glass, I added yellow lines to mark the range. The left side shows the stern pitched down and the right side shows it pitched up.

I took another pair of photos looking forward at a viewing platform near the front of the ship. You can get a good idea of how much we're moving up and down today.  Both photos were taken from the same spot.  The left side shows the bow pitched down and the right side shows the bow pitched up.

Arlona is pretty much back to 100% except for a little minor discomfort from the ship's movement.  Nothing bad and not to the point of needing Dramamine. 

After breakfast, we continued our journey learning bridge.  Some things are starting to make more sense, but boy, are there a lot of subtleties and nuances in the bidding process.  More to learn.

The Captain's noon announcement included the news of another COVID case detected last night.  We now have 14 guests and 5 crew for a total of 19 people isolated and two additional people in preventative quarantine until they either test positive and go into isolation or pass enough negative tests to be released.

We are not "nap people".  In the entirety of the four years that we have been retired, we have taken an afternoon nap perhaps three times.  Today we upped the count.  Given our poor sleep last night, as we were reading our Kindles this afternoon, both of us were struggling with gravity's effects on our eyelids.  Rather than fight it, we opted to pop into bed and nap like professionals.  It was lovely and we both enjoyed it.

 Tonight, the World Cafe featured Greek night.  We sampled a variety of dishes and had a very nice meal.  Given that we both are still tired, we headed back to the room.  On the way, we caught a nice view of the crescent moon and Jupiter, gracing the night sky.

Tomorrow, we have another sea day.