Advertisement
Published: December 11th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Sea Day / Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia - December 9th, 2008 - 1:08pm
Well today’s been a really fun/busy/interesting day. Lee was up at 8:30 to get ready for work and I was up as well. I said my farewells to him and read a bit of my book. Jumped in the shower and ran up to grab some breakie. I had a great breakfast outside on deck 10 looking at the sea, we are in the middle of nowhere so there isn’t much view but it is still spectacular. I took a look at the daily and decided what I wanted to do today. I first went to a seminar with Naturalist Craig Ward. He’s a Australia guy onboard talking about Australia’s Bio-diversity and the bucket List, Southern Oceans, and Unique New Zealand. His talk today was on Bio-diversity and the bucket List. I thought it was like watching a national geographic show live. He talked about all the animals that are local to Australia. It is a small island but there are thousands of animals. Hey Gran you’ll like this comment…Australia is home to 19 of the 25 most venomous snakes in the world and he had lots
of pictures of the slimy buggers! Love you gran. It was very interesting.
There was a Tropical Cocktail Mixology talk on…of course that was my next stop. It was alright. He talked about how to make Cosmopolitans, B52 shooters and a Rum Cocktail. I was standing there listening to the seminar and I look to my right and low and behold I’m standing beside the captain. He seems much friendlier then the previous captain. She shook a few hands and was on his way.
I ran up to the spa to talk to the girls quickly to see if one of them would do an up do for me tomorrow as it is Lee and my one-year anniversary. We are heading to the famous Olympic for dinner. I then had to hurry to the theatre and Luc and Lee were doing their talk on the excursions. I wanted to hear about all the tours and try and pick the ones that I wanted to go on, but there are just so many in this part of the world that I want to go see them all. Sea days aren’t going to be very much fun as I’m stuck
on the ship by myself as Lee works. But I know the port days will be a blast. It still is very weird to be onboard as a guest. It took me until today to figure out how to get to areas in guest areas only. I could do it in crew areas no problem but now I have to wait behind to slow people to get anywhere. It’s awesome though. I am enjoying myself.
Off to read and relax…maybe hit up the gym before we get to Phillip Island.
So I ended up not going to the gym again…I really should make my way up there. Lee and I were heading out for an excursion and then needed some help dispatching so I helped out. It took a little while for the guests to figure everything out. I walked a few groups to the gang way and then Lee and I were finally off. We were going to the Penguin Parade, where we watch the Little Penguins come back onshore for their day at sea/hunting, to feed their children and then off to bed. They come in late at night so that it’s harder for their predators
to attack them.
We had to tender to the island today, it was a little rocky and one of the guests nearly fell in the water trying to get onto the dock. Not too sure what happened there but he walked away with a few complaints to Celebrity. We finally got on the bus to head to the Parade. My bus driver was awesome, he was very informative. The Penguins name is really Little Penguin, they used to be called Fairy Penguin but he said the gays didn’t like that so they changed to Little Penguin. I don’t know the real reason why the changed but they did. They leave early in the morning before the sun comes up and arrive late at night when the sun goes down. The penguins find their way back to their homes the same way we do, they recognize the area and go back to their burrows. They also squeak so that their young know they are coming home and it makes it easier for them to find their burrows. It was quiet amazing to see them waddle up on the beach, some groups took a little while to get on shore because as their name suggests they are little. The waves would push them up on shore but if they weren’t fast enough then the next wave would take them back out to sea, they all made it safely. Some of them would walk up to a km just to get back to their burrows. I was also reading that they go through a phase called moulding (I think that’s what they called it) where the shed their feathers. This process lasts about 17 days where they do not enter the water, so they slowly gather enough food to be able to last the 17 days. In these days they shed every single feather and replace them so their coat is waterproof once again.
We did manage to get a few pictures but they aren’t the best as Lee had to be sneaky to take the pictures. Pictures and video were forbidden as they didn’t want to damage the penguins’ vision or startle the penguins.
Well that’s my little tidbit of national geographic information. Off to catch some zzz’s.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.179s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 42; dbt: 0.06s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb