The number of these Sea Days again gives us a sense of how big this planet really is. The distance between the last stop, Maputo, Mozambique, and our next stop, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is 1,393 miles (as the crow flies, so to speak). The distance from Portland, ME to Miami FL is 1,354 miles. No wonder the captain decided to cut out the stop in Madagascar because of the winds and currents.
Today is another quiet day, which is just as well as we have three busy days in a row starting tomorrow. At 10:15, we have an Anti-Piracy Safety Drill. Our part is to meet in the hallway of our stateroom for about fifteen minutes and listen to the instructions from the crew. The principal instruction, should the ship actually be boarded by pirates, is to secure ourselves in the very interior of the ship where all the staff keeps equipment and maneuvers around the ship – the places we can’t go under normal circumstances. The captain announces the drill this way: “Exercise. Exercise. Exercise. This is a drill. We are maneuvering to avoid collision with suspicious boat. You may experience heavy listing. Exercise. Exercise. Exercise.”
A nice fringe benefit is that we meet our next door neighbor in stateroom 7042. We still don’t have their names (for shame) but she is from South America and he is from Switzerland. We strike up enough of a conversation that we agree to have dinner sometime soon. So this drill has added to our social life. Who knew?
The only other activity we participate in is a lecture from Peter Coyle on our upcoming stops in Zanzibar (after Dar es Salaam) and Mombasa, Kenya. The rest of the day is a blur, so it must have been pretty quiet.
Time to get on to more interesting things.
