Life aboard ship

Since we are not going to be getting off the ship for a while (7 days in total) I thought I’d show you a bit of what I do on such days. Every other sea day we have our men’s and women’s Bible studies

and on the other day we have the Mixed group which watches the videos that the men watched the day before (the women asked if they could see them and the men come to see them again!). The cruise director is very accommodating; giving us nice rooms in which to meet and providing equipment.

We also have the Sunday evening church service here (above) with 30 to 40 people attending. It has been a joy working together with our friends, Jim and Janet, who have hosted that service as well as the Mixed group.

There are many lectures, forums, classes and entertainments on Sea Days as well as game tables and time to make your own fun. I go to the puzzle table for a while most days and have made lots of friends there. We all try to convince ourselves that it is good brain exercise, but we know that it’s really only fun.

I brought along my quilling supplies and finally got them out and invited anyone who wanted to to make a snowflake with me. The group doubled the second day as people passed by and wanted to do it so now we are going to do a third day. Everyone is happy with their creations — which didn’t all turn out to be snowflakes after all.

The crew works hard to make fun events especially on these long strings of Sea Days. And today was a prime example! At 5:00 we were to pass Null Island, the point of intersection of the Prime Meridian and the Equator, or zero degrees longitude and zero degrees latitude. It started out as a joke but has become useful in mapping software and there has been a weather buoy tethered there in the 16,000 foot deep ocean. So the thing was to find it. When we were here in 2015 Dale took a picture of it

but today it just wasn’t there. The weather service says it hasn’t received any data from it for the last 45 days so we knew that our search was in vain even before we got there but everyone dutifully looked anyway as the captain circled the location.

And then a few officers took a tender out so they could take a picture looking back at everyone on the ship looking for the buoy. Crazy!

The other activity occupying many people these days is a scavenger hunt of 60 items on the ship which must be found and photographed with the contestant in the picture. No one knows what the prize is but they are enjoying the challenge very much.

There’s more but I’ll leave you with that little sample of our life here when there’s no where else to go.