Day 42 - February 14, 2008 - at sea

Sea Day photos
Happy Valentine's Day! Hopefully, today our Valentine's Day gift from RSSC will be an afternoon of Internet access! Fingers crossed. Other than that according to Passages the only observance of this special holiday will be Romantic Stargazing. Margie is not too pleased with that but we all plan to stay up late to participate anyway and hope the romance theme does not override the stargazing possibilities as we approach the Equator again.
Margie is still not feeling well and is now running a low fever. She stayed in bed or in her room today. Debbie and Clay went out for early breakfast again so Debbie could go to morning exercise classes. Sadly, in addition to no raspberries there were also no chocolate croissants. Debbie only had coffee and Clay had a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal. Debbie did all the laundry on Deck 10 after morning exercise classes. There was a Rossini BBQ on the Pool Deck at lunch. You never know what that means. So, Debbie and Clay went up and found them grilling lobster tails and chicken thighs and fish fillets. We weren't really interested and it was really hot and humid up there. Capt. Delavault was cooking crepes for dessert with a French waitress but we went down to Compass Rose instead. We came back up for dessert crepes later. It was still really hot and humid, but there were some seats available in the shade now. We got our single crepe each and could fill it ourselves from bowls with seedless raspberry jam, chocolate sundae syrup, caramel sundae syrup, maple syrup, brown or white sugar. Capt. Phillipe has a good flipping technique.
We plan to go to LaVeranda for dinner with the Italian Steakhouse menu tonight if everyone is up to dinner later. Tomorrow it sounds like LaVeranda will become a churrascaria. One of those places with the grilled meats. We'll see. Also, Latitudes has been Indochine for the past 3 nights and is now Asia Fusion or something like that. We have not made any reservations yet. Latitudes has been packed the past couple of nights and Debbie has heard complaints in exercise class about people on this segment not being able to get reservations in the specialty restaurants. If we get anything new or different, we'll report it here. The show in the theater tonight is a Latin singer, Peter Fernandez. Not sure if anyone will be going.
We have been slowly treading water up the coast of Brazil today. Capt. Delavault announced at noon that he is adjusting speed to be on schedule to pick up the pilot tomorrow morning at 6am and expects to be on time in Fortaleza at 7am. We still have no plans here and it will just have to stay that way and we'll figure something out on arrival. The 2 ship's excursions here are not appealing to us. A city highlights tour for 3.5 hours at $42pp. Ride the Cumbuco Beach sand dunes in 4-wheel vehicles for 4 hours for $72pp. So, we'll just have to see how everyone is feeling tomorrow and what we can find to do after we arrive. From here on out most of our ports are very small places without a lot of tourist infrastructure.
The coastline is more distant, or not visible at all today. The weather is hotter still and we are about 4 degrees below the Equator. The seas are rougher. Yesterday they were about 3 feet and today at noon the Captain said they were about 7 feet. Since we are only going about 12 knots and apparently without the stabilizers deployed we are feeling it today. As the afternoon wore on, we got some rolling swells too and the side to side rolling was pretty pronounced.
Internet did show back up, though intermittently around 4:30, but it was so temperamental that we could not get any pictures downloaded before dinner.
Clay and Debbie did make it to LaVeranda for dinner. It was not too crowded as most people seemed to be eating elsewhere. Margie opted for a quarantined room service broth and macaroni & cheese so she would not infect anyone else. She said the M&C was good. Chimi, the maitre'd at LaVeranda gave Debbie a red rose at the end of the meal. It seemed that every woman was getting one that evening in all the restaurants. Debbie was the first to get one as we finished our meal very early, before 8pm. That meant we had to kill 2 and half hours before the star gazing. We spent it uploading our Iguazu Falls and Salvador pictures. It worked out perfectly to fill the time. Getting the pictures uploaded is a matter of luck, patience, perseverance and holding your mouth right as the bits fly by. Margie got her rose delivered by room service. In addition to our regular bed chocolates tonight, each cabin also got a small red foil-wrapped chocolate heart.
About 10:30pm, we all headed up to the Observation Lounge for the Star Gazing. There were about 10-15 people there we got there and sat about 4 empty rows away from a stand that held a hand-drawn book of poster paper with constellations on them. There was a very nervous 2nd Officer, Jean-Renaud, who was going to led the gazing. When the 10:45 time arrived, there were 50-60 people present and all the empty rows were filled, and the 2nd Officer was even more nervous. There was a Star Watch handout available, but not enough for all the people present. David, the assistant cruise director, introduced the 2nd officer. David said that they were not expecting this many people for the gazing. In fact, he said that this was the most people he had ever seen up this late. He put a sign-up sheet at the back of the room so he could provide copies of the Star Watch booklet to everyone present. He also said we would get Star Gazing certificates. Jean-Renaud did a good job. His nervousness wore off as he got to showing us the stars. The first 5-10 minutes of the discussion was done in the lounge using the posters. He also showed us one of the two sextants that they had on the bridge and a star chart as well. Some woman made a joke trying to calm Jean's nerves. She said that Jean should not be nervous as he definitely knew more about navigation and the stars than anybody else in the room. But then David said thatthe Captain was at the back of the room and everyone turned around to look and Capt. Phillipe waved and everyone started laughing.
When the outside portion of the gazing started, they totally darkened deck 12 and also most of deck 11. So it was darker than when we were up on deck 12 earlier in the trip looking for the Southern Cross ourselves. We first saw Orion's belt which are about the most obvious three stars in the sky. Jean pointed out several other constellations and then finally the Southern Cross. It was what we had spotted earlier. The gazing lasted almost an hour. As we left, we passed Terry Breen and the Captain. Terry Stopped Debbie and told her that see her persistence had finally paid off and the Captain chatted about what we had seen and the surprising crowd and that he was glad that Jean-Renaud had volunteered to do this and about the Certificates that he would be issuing. There was a half moon directly in front of the ship and a few wispy clouds that came and went that detracted a little from what we saw, but it was still a good evening. We missed star gazing in the crystal clear, moonless skies off the Chilean coast, but we did get a pretty good evening here and we were glad for the opportunity.
Sea Day photos