Cruise Day 6 - Canal Sarmiento

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Another day at sea as we began cruising Canal Sarmiento. Unfortunately the weather remained bleak and the temperature dropped into single figures; so glad now that I lugged my puffer jacket half way around the world!! I broke out the Vegemite this morning to have on my toast for breakfast. I'm trying to eat fairly lightly out of deference to my dodgy digestive system and our travel papers arrived from Bunnick in a wallet that very thoughtfully included some individual serves of Vegemite. I need my guts to have settled down by later today because we have booked in for a degustation dinner in the Pinnacle Grill.

We had a long day of cruising today before we arrived at our first point of interest - Paso Summer at 4.00pm. Captain PJ told us earlier in the day that we needed to arrive at 4.00pm because the pass is very shallow and we needed to negotiate it at high tide to have as much water as possible underneath us. We were told that we would have about 2.4metres (11 feet) of clearance!

After negotiating Paso Summer very slowly we continued on our way to Paso Shoal and its shipwreck. From what I understood of the commentary this pass is narrow rather than shallow and the wreck is of a ship that failed to make a hard right at the critical moment and ran aground on the shoal. Ryan gave us a lengthy spiel about the ship that had been commissioned, decommissioned, recommissioned and then sailed as a merchant ship for many years before coming to grief.

Well, the hour for our degustation dinner arrived and I was starving. I hadn't eaten much all day and really haven't kept much in my system for any length of time since Wednesday afternoon. A degustation dinner - with matched wines! - probably isn't a good idea but, damn it, the cancellation window has passed so we're going to be charged for it anyway. Who knows, if it doesn't kill me it might cure me??

I managed to make it through dinner without interruption which is more than can be said for Bernie. He accepted the waiters invitation to have pepper on one of the entrees and that resulted in him coughing uncontrollably because he has a slightly sensitive throat due to his head cold. Meredith mentioned that there is a shop upstairs that carries a few chemist lines such as cold and flu tablets and cough medicines. He raced upstairs to buy something to settle his cough. Hmmn, I'm not sure it's good look having all your wine glasses in a row with a bottle of pink cough medicine on the side??! And we didn't read the fine print to see if alcohol was supposed to be avoided while taking it.



Steps 8,093 (6.10km)

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