11/19/2022

 

 

            

 

                                        Position of the Ship                                                               

                                                            Sunrise

 

This is the first of 4 sea days (saw a t-shirt the other day that advertised “Seas the Day”).  The next time we see land will be on 11/23 at Recife, Brazil, South America.  And so lazy days of eating, walking, lecturing, arting, line dancing, and more food and lots of time to ponder and read.  

 

Another cool thing about the Viking Ocean ships is their extensive libraries.  There are many nooks and shelves with topical books all around the ship with the label of which library area they are from.  The Explorer’s lounge area has adventure and travel books for instance while the pool area has cozies and the Atrium area has eclectic times and the history area contains books of historical genre.  Paul is reading about Fridtjof Nansen (look him up in Wikipedia), while Shirley read The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey and is currently reading English Passengers by Matthew Kneale.  The latter is an intriguing account of the various types of people from England who travelled to Australia and Tasmania  in the 19^th century and their ineffective ways of learning to live with the aborigines.  Bob finished the Spirituality of Quantum Mechanics (good for Bob!) and on the hunt for something else.  We have learned that bringing books from home is just dead weight.

 

So, this begins the actual crossing of the Atlantic.  On the Ventusky app we can see the radar, the winds, the wave levels and more.  We have a nice tail wind courtesy of the Trade winds and the seas are a bit heavier than in the Atlantic north of Cape Verde.  We are (I think) still over the Great Abyssal Plain where the depth is 4 miles or so.  The skies are partly cloudy, and the humidity seems high as the haze is pervasive.

            

Satellite View  

Wave screen 

Humidity

We are approximately in the middle of the screen shots of the Ventusky app (thanks Megan!)

 

Flying fish are seen a lot, sometimes in schools.  Much too fast for a picture, but from Deck 5, they appear like dragon flies flitting out of the way of the ship as she plows through the swells.  The swells are hard to judge as to how high especially from this vantage point.  I imagine if we were on the Nina or Pinta – or the Kon-Tiki – it would seem a lot more dire.  The Ventusky app puts them at ~7+ feet (if “ft ICON (DWD)” mean 12 imperial inches) in the approximate area.  The day before yesterday they reported 5 – 6 units, so the heavier seas generalization seems to be accurate.

After all that relaxing and eating and learning – we are very grateful for a grand day.  We will be setting our clocks back again tonight as we will be traversing another time zone.  But what to key on?  Our iPhones cannot connect to the mother ship to auto-magically change times, we have to do that we have to key in a city in the appropriate zone.  We did Funchal and we did Cape Verde, but after that is Recife and that is two zones away.  Luckily we have the internet and we can ask about time zones in the Atlantic Ocean .

 

 

As it happens Fernando do Noronha was the one we wanted – thank you Internet.

 

The sunset was beautiful this evening, but my phone was not handy at the time.