Friday, Day 62 - Mar 9 - Cruising the South China Sea

We wake to grey skies again this morning. There is mountainous looking land to the west, the Indonesian island of Borneo, and lots of rain around. A moderate gale is blowing, but the sea is not rough like it has been at times. We will find out at noon if we will make Kota Kinabalu tomorrow, We still have over 500 miles to go.

The Navigator sailed across the Equator at 3AM, but Jack doesn’t believe it since he didn’t see the yellow line. In honor of the crossing there will be another crossing ceremony at 10:45AM and Jamie has promised a surprise. This is our second of four crossing on this trip.

We go to breakfast at the usual time and check the daily program to see what we want to do since the usual activities are replaced by some special ones today. First off Carolyn goes and gets a ballot for the door decorating contest. It has an Indonesian theme this time and there are ten entries. She walks the decks looking at all of them. Once again it is hard to pick a winner. There are three really good ones that are very creative and fit the theme nicely. There is one that is very nice in that it celebrates the crew with nice pictures of the crew. She is sure the crew enjoys it since they work so hard to keep us happy. And there is one that has everyone laughing; look at the pictures below and see if you can find it.

If you chose the ”Charter Member of the Stuck in the Mud Society," you win!

At 10:45AM we go up to the pool deck to see the Crossing Ceremony and in keeping with the theme of this segment (the Plan “B” cruise) it is raining just a little but a hard rain shower has just past over. Being the seasoned sailors that we all have become, we go out and watch King Neptune arrive.

The crew has spent all morning setting up a Country Fair mostly in the rain. This is where each department designs a carnival type game for the passengers to play, the funnier the better. King Neptune is told that we are having a Fair in his honor so he gives the Polywogs a pass on kissing the fish and a dunking in the pool declaring them Shellbacks and the Fair open for fun. The activities are funny especially the Hula-Hoop contest! The crew have even more fun watching the passengers act crazy than the passengers do playing the games. Even our poor stressed Captain has a chuckle or two.

At noon the Captain gives us an update. For the world cruisers, we have traveled 17, 220 nautical miles or almost half of the 39,000 nautical miles of the cruise, LA to LA. Hard to believe! At noon we were 450 nautical miles from Kota Kinabalu. We have sailed at an average of 17.2 knots/hr since leaving Bali and have 100 feet of sea beneath us. We have lost the strong current, but still have gale force winds of 30 knots on the bow. He says we are scheduled to pick up the pilot at 12:30PM tomorrow. So we should make the port by the scheduled time...unless something else happens. Carolyn goes to lunch and has a bowl of wonderful loaded potato soup. Dick is passing on lunch most days.

Carolyn goes to afternoon cards and makes the memory card for this segment. There is lots of laughing about what to do with the pictures for the two ports we missed! Dick stays in the suite playing on the computer, reading and working on the pictures, all while watching the weather deteriorate.

There is a pre-dinner party for the Seven Seas Society on the pool deck at 6PM but it is too windy and the seas are getting very rough so we move to the theater. Clive and a lady guest with a beautiful voice play and sing some popular tunes for the group. We also learn that the passengers on this cruise have more total guest days than the passengers on the other three ships currently have combined. Eight guests have a combined total of more than10,000 days on Regent and then there are another 400+ guest's days on Regent added to that amount.

Tonight we have a special order dinner. We requested fish and chips British style!  The meal is good, but not exactly British fish and chips. Carolyn was not specific enough as to the type of fish and we got fried potato wedges instead of french fries. They replaced the fries right away and next time Carolyn will know to specify the type of fish, cod or halibut.

Back in the suite we have a card telling us our tour time has moved again from 3:30PM to 1:40PM. It was originally 9:30AM. We are rocking and rolling again so should sleep well!