Geo: -33.979, 18.5102At Sea 23-26/01/09 It's a painful experience watching some of the passengers who have bought new cameras & PCs etc but have no idea of how to use them, I was up in the study the other day when an elderly woman was berating the I.T. Manager that the system had lost her emails and all the attachments from her PC anyway she was fortunate that the manger got her to log into her account and restored all the emails that had been moved to another folder, although she was adamant that the were moved by a fault in the ships system and she hadn't touched nothing, yeah right. There were far too many silver surfers for me so I decided to return late in the evening to complete my emails, once again a ... read more

Geo: 16.0021, -24.0132Saturday 17/01/09 St Vincent - Cape Verde Islands A truly volcanic island chain, the barren rugged mountains dominate the landscape and the surrounding islands to the extent that it resembles a lunar landscape. After a brief visit to the city of Mindelo we travelled on to Catfish Bay to take in the majestic sights of the bay and the rugged mountain backdrop, the strong winds and fabulous breaking waves would make this a windsurfers/boarders paradise. Having watched the Carnival Tan Tan band we saw the Mindelo Carnival Kings & Queens in their colourful costumes and the local fishermen with their boats before winding our way back to the ship. From a distant the roads look like any normal tarmac surface but in fact the roads are all constructed of black volcanic cobblestones making for ... read more

Geo: 50.8998, -1.39561Sunday 11/01/09 The day's finally arrived; we left home by coach at 10:15 for the uneventful 3 ½ coach trip to Southampton docks. Onceat the berth there was as expected the snaking queue of hundreds of people all with the same thought on their minds; lets get this over with quickly, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised, the process from joining the queue to opening the cabin door was just under 30 minutes, not bad at all. The cabin's fine with plenty of storage space (which we'll need for the next 3 months) it's positionedamidships and on level 9 as originally booked which places us pretty much dead centre of the ship which I anticipate will lessen the impact of pitching and rolling in heavy seas. (I checked the weather forecastfor the ... read more