Day 6 - At Sea

Date:  Jan. 14, 2007

 

Location:  At Sea

 

Next Port:  Belem, Brazil, Jan. 16

 

Quick Summary:  Our first Sunday on the Voyager. Workouts, a meaningful church service, a unique NFL football experience, a fine dinner with new friends and a Skype video call with our family. And did I mention, a Bears victory!

 

Report:  We both got our morning workouts in before the Protestant church service in the Horizons Lounge at 9:15. Our cruise director, Jamie, conducted the service along with his wife, Dana. They both do this, not as a duty, but as a dedicated Christian commitment. We sang a couple of hymns, had two responsive readings and Jamie read a couple passages from contemporary writings. There were about 30 attendees and it was a very meaningful experience.

 

At 11:00, we enjoyed Niki Sepsas’ lecture on the Amazon River. Just a few facts: The river is 200 miles wide at its mouth; because of its tremendous flow, you find fresh water 125 miles out to sea; and more water flows out of the river in one day than NYC uses in 9 years. The silt from the river has built an island at it is mouth that is the size of Switzerland.

 

After lunch, on the somewhat breezy pool deck, Karen got some laundry done…there are complimentary launderettes on each deck… while Larry read in the sun. Then it was time for football…sort of. They displayed a graphical streaming feed of Yahoo.com on a large screen in the Voyager Lounge. It sort of equates to watching paint dry. Larry had on his Bears shirt and most of the crowd of 25 enjoyed the Bears’ overtime victory.

 

We enjoyed dinner in Compass Rose with Joan and David from Hilton Head. We first met them in Miami at the breakfast hosted by our shared travel agent. After dinner, the four of us enjoyed the performance of Bob Neighbor, a terrific clarinet player.

 

Upon returning to the room, Larry was on-line checking the score of the Chargers game (sorry, Ron and Heather), when the Skype connection on the computer rang. It was our daughter Heather and husband Ron from San Diego. We attempted to conference in our daughter Kristin from NYC, but the echo/voice talk over was too great.

 

We had Kristin hang up and continued to talk with Heather and Ron. When finished, Heather had Kristin call us. In this manner it worked fine. Since these were only single connections, we were also able to get the video to work. What great fun! (We had tried unsuccessfully to call out using Skype, but it seems the Skype proxy server is being blocked. We need to investigate more. But at least incoming calls seem to work!)

 

We cross the equator  on Tuesday. Though Karen and I are pollywogs (people who have never crossed the equator by sea), I believe the ceremony will be held after we pick up King Neptune in Belem. Hey, if the Captain can change the time whenever he wants to (we advanced our clocks 30 minutes today at 2:00 pm.), I guess he can also dictate when we cross the equator. Such power! Now if he could only calm the winds.

 

Karen and Larry