20250102 Seabourn Sojourn Grand Africa Cruise Day 38/96 - Sea Day

Grand Africa Cruise Trip Day 38/96 - Sea Day almost winning in the Mozambique Channel

Today is our final sea day of this stretch of sea days. We're sailing in the Mozambique channel between the east coast of Mozambique and the west coast of Madagascar. 

The day was filled with the typical sea day activities.  First up was putting. Putting on a cruise ship is a little different than putting on land. The putting green is on Deck #11, outside on the top deck of the ship. There is always significant wind that impacts the ball's travel, but the bigger issue is the ship's movement, both fore/aft and side-to-side. It's not uncommon to see the ball change direction more than once while rolling. While putting skill certainly comes into play, there is a certain random impact that also plays a role.

I held my own today, putting out in two strokes on all three holes. One other golfer, scored an ace on one hole and two on each of the other two holes, netting five strokes and besting me by one stroke. That's two one-stroke losses in a row. Dang.

Arlona did one art project today, a watercolor of a beach sunset. I think it turned out nicely.

Seabourn kicked off a boat-building competition today. The actual event will occur on January 10 when the boats will have to sail the length of the pool (with propulsion assistance provided by the crew), carrying a 1.5-kilo tin of caviar. We were asked to join a team, so the six of us will work together to design a boat that will handle the task and have some style. We'll see how that goes.

We attended another cooking demonstration today. The dish was cuttlefish ink risotto with crab meat, octopus, calamari, and peppers. It was interesting to see how they toasted the rice before cooking it. They added the cuttlefish ink and finished it with the seafood and peppers.

Chefs Ainsley and Mario with Cruise Director, Nick overseeing the process

The results - a stick-to-your-ribs kind of meal

Trivia today went fairly well. We remain in third but narrowed the point gap today. One thing that Seabourn provides each day at trivia is freshly popped popcorn. Today, we got to see the vessel they used to pop it.

That is one huge pan!

Today's failures:

• Where was the first Disney theme park built outside the United States?
• We were torn between Paris and Tokyo and guessed Paris - it was Tokyo
• The "S" in Swatch (the watch company) stands for...Sport/Second/Swiss?
• We guessed Sport - the entire room missed that it was actually Second as it was designed to be a cheap, disposable, second watch, not a primary timepiece
• The Isle of Man is part of the United Kingdom - true or false?
• We guessed True - while it is a Crown protectorate, it is not and has never been in the U.K. or the European Union
• Name the highest and lowest world capital cities by elevation
• We got La Paz, Bolivia (11,975 feet above sea level)  but missed Baku, Azerbaijan (92 feet below sea level)

Baggo was held this afternoon. We both competed but fell a little short. We still had fun and enjoyed talking with the other folks.

In one round, we had to throw with our non-dominant hand

Name That Tune was better than the last disco round. We scored 30/40, losing to another team with 32/40. We've been in this bridesmaid position too many times lately.

We did our usual pre-dinner routine at the Observation Bar and Arlona once again captured a stunning sunset.

We received a last-minute invitation to a hosted dinner this evening. The host was the resident bridge instructor. We had only one other guest so it was another very small group. Dinner was good as usual and we had interesting conversations.

We called it a night after dinner. Tomorrow morning, we will anchor off of Ilha de Moçambique, Mozambique, and spend the day on the island.