At sea, heading for Papua New Guinea

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Friday 9^th March 2012:

What an interesting day. Or at least we managed to get enough interesting things into one hour this morning that was more than enough for the rest of the day!

Painful start – back to the gym for the first time since leaving the Queen Elizabeth. About the only semi good thing I can say is that I broke a sweat a lot quicker than I did nearly 2 weeks ago!

And then it was breakfast and we really enjoy going to the main dining room and socialising and we hit lucky today. A table for 6 with everyone really nice. And then all the lights went out. And all the engines stopped. And the emergency lighting came on. And we all thought surely we’re not going to become a Costa ship! The staff were very calm but it was a somewhat unnerving time. The Captain was excellent and come over the tannoy very quickly to say they didn’t know the cause but the ship had lost all propulsion as all the engines had stopped. We still don’t know the whole story but one of the generators packed up and then all 4 engines followed it. They managed to get 3 engines re-started less than 10 minutes later but it was a slightly worrying time. In his mid-day transmission from the Bridge, the Captain told us he had alerted the Australian maritime rescue people in case we ended up needing help. But all is well now and I don’t know if we’re on 3 or 4 engines but they’ve been working ever since.

But, not surprisingly, that started talk about interesting things that people had experienced on other cruises. Richard and I are ‘interesting incident’ virgins but one of the couples had been in New Zealand last year when they had the terrible earthquake in Christchurch and they felt 3 earthquakes on board their ship such that the wood cladding on some of the walls was banging together and the ship was thudding against the harbour walls. But they paled into insignificance when the other couple described their experience of being attacked by Somali pirates. Two small boats of pirates shot at their ship (a very up-market Yachts of Seabourne) and then started firing rocket propelled grenades at them. Two grenades landed. One went through a cabin – with people in it – but got stuck in the ceiling and, fortunately, failed to explode. But another grenade landed in a store room and did explode and badly injured one poor crew member. Their captain made everyone go down to the dining room in the lowest part of the ship and crouch on the floor. He then drove the ship as fast as he could making a zig-zag route through the water. This made the pirates’ boats rock about badly so they couldn’t get a good shot at the boat and in the end they managed to out-run the pirates.

Blinkin’ heck! I don’t really think losing power for 10 minutes comes even close!

The rest of the day was absolutely gorgeous: hot, sunny, totally relaxing, lovely sunset tonight, poncey cocktail party with the captain – and several hundred other guests – and a lovely fillet steak and lobster dinner. What a great first full day at sea!

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