We wake up at the usual time and see a beautiful sunrise. The sea is still pretty busy, with 8-10-foot waves rolling at us from the north, giving the ship is pretty good roll since we are heading virtually due east.
But it could be worse – way worse – as we find out when Cruise Director Ray Carr interviews Captain Morvillo. This is a special program put together to explain why the significant itinerary change. We have an opportunity to see one of the applications that Oceania uses to determine how the ship will react in upcoming weather conditions. He shows us our old course, which puts us in an enormous storm. He shows us the new course where the ship is literally running ahead of another storm, which is why we are cruising at 19 knots (this is the fastest speed we have seen Insignia doing on this entire trip) to make sure we don’t even get near the fringe of the bad weather.
He also goes on to explain wave heights. Insignia isn’t concerned with the averagewave height. Her crew is concerned with the highest wave height that the ship will have to deal with. In our case, that would have been thirty feet. The captain states calmly in his Italian accent: “We can’t manage waves of that height.”
We receive another letter from the captain later in the morning. Turns out we will arrive in Auckland on the 13that 10am and stay until 6:00pm on the 14th. We are sorry to miss Melbourne and Burnie, but this is a great substitute.
We meet up with Brian at 4pm. We all call it “Cigar Time” because that is when he, Rich Rosenthal and a couple of others meet in the smoking area on the open air part of Deck 9. Brian has a small, very good speaker and 6,000 songs on his iPhone, so he plays DJ and everybody tries to guess the title and artist. It is a lot of fun, so we join them today.
By the time we are ready to eat, we decide that a room service meal is the way to go. Steve has a cheese plate and Cathy has the same and onion soup. M-m-m-m. We could get used to this!
