April 14, 2024 Sea Day #1
Today is Sea Day # 1 (of 6 in a row). The 7:30 a.m. temperature was 20°C and a few small clouds in a sunny sky with a breeze. We had breakfast in the dining room with a couple from Kansas City and another couple who split their time between Florida and Germany.
We walked on the Promenade Deck 3 for 40 minutes before going to the B.B. King's Blues Club for the Cruise Critic Meet & Mingle. There were about 130 people in attendance, who had been posting on this cruise’s Cruise Critic web page. The ship provided coffee, tea and cookies. The captain and managers of the different departments were introduced. Then the Cruise Critic activities were reviewed. There was a slot pull in the casino this afternoon where participants paid $20 to pull the lever of dedicated slot machine. I think one person would win, we did not go. We climbed up to deck 11 to walk around the open jogging track in the sunshine. At noon the captain’s announcement reminded passengers that clocks should be advanced one hour to 1 p.m. and that a passenger was quite ill requiring the ship to divert toward Bermuda for another medical evacuation by boat. We were out of the range for the United States helicopter to do the evacuation. This had happened last August when our ship, the Zuiderdam, was near Greenland and a seriously ill passenger had to have a helicopter medical evacuation.
The ship had travelled 354 nautical miles since departing Fort Lauderdale including last evening’s diversion toward West Palm Beach for yesterday’s crew member medical emergency that was a rendezvous with a boat. Our course is NE 65.21°. Bermuda is not too far off the original course to the Azores. We will just slow down to do the transfer to the other boat.
In the stairways, as mentioned yesterday, there are different art pieces today, we photographed the knitted townhouses which might represent Amsterdam and a model of spaghetti-like houses made from thin strands of bronze.
We had a light lunch at the Lido buffet on deck 9. Both swimming pools are on this deck. The retractable roof that covered the larger pool was almost closed. The jogging track on deck 11 circles the pool’s roof. There was more noticeable wind on deck 11 than on Deck 3’s sheltered Promenade deck. By lunchtime we had logged over 10,500 steps.
On the stateroom TV, the view from the Navigation deck camera looking out over the bow, has a channel, as does the camera on the back (aft) of the ship. Today both channels show seas with 1.5 meter swells and a sunny sky. We saw an occasional distant freighter on the horizon.
Every Sea Day afternoon there is Afternoon Tea in the main dining room, complete with tiny sandwiches and bite size cakes or cookies. It is not an event that we usually attend as our daily dinner reservation is 5 p.m.
Tonight was dressy evening in the dining rooms. The ship’s photographers have stations on decks 2 and 3 for taking posed pictures of people in their “Sunday Best” outfits. We sat at the same table and have the same people as last night and for the rest of the cruise. The waiter and assistant waiter also will be the same. A surprise at the end of the meal, as we exited the dining room, was a staff person behind a table with mints and candied ginger. Pre COVID on Holland America there was always a uniformed person at the mint table dispensing the candies, but this is the first time we noticed it in a long time. It could be an extra just on the “dressy” dinner attire evenings.
There was a Ballroom Dance Hour at 5:30 p.m. and tomorrow it will be 6 p.m. Neither works because of our dinner reservation.
The show in the theatre was Santiago Michel, a Mentalist. The poolside movie at 8:15 this evening was Barbie. The deck loungers with thick cushions were set up to face the huge screen. They were very comfortable. Some people were using the large pool towels as blankets but the temperature was about 21°C. The minor sloshing of the pool made hearing the dialogue hard to follow at times. After 55 minutes we bailed to the Exploration Café for Mochas. Today’s steps were 15,439
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