Thursday, Day 61 - Mar 8 - Cruising the Karimata Strait

We wake at the usual time to a grey day. The seas are calm but a very unattractive color. Off to breakfast where we try to eat lightly as we have Prime 7 reservations for tonight.

Thus begins another routine sea day; we are having a lot of these recently. Carolyn really enjoys the slow pace and watching the sea roll by, Dick not so much after a day or two. He goes to Bishop’s lecture on “James Brooke - White Rajah of Sarawak,” but skips the one by Eltaher. He is just too hard to understand lecturing though an interesting guy to talk to one on one. Carolyn goes to Sarah’s card class where she learns how to make feet that we turn into a baby card or a friendship card.

Then there is lunch and the afternoon card class for Carolyn and a writing workshop by Dana for Dick. He really enjoyed the first one where Dana worked on a writing skill, but today two guests talked about their publishing company experiences. Dick said it was only OK as it really had nothing to do with improving writing shills.

The Navigator is having a really hard time catching a break since we lost the 30 some hours of sailing time in Bali. Yesterday we made good time with the Captain trying to make up some time to get to Kota Kinabalu earlier instead of the new 2PM arrival time. Then at 10AM today, we received new tour tickets for Kota Kinabalu with the new departure time. Our tour was changed from 9:30AM to 3:30PM. It is ashort tour so the later time is no problem.

Well, on the noon announcement the Captain tells us we are fighting a very strong current and head wind that has slowed us down, even though he is going as fast as he can. If things don’t change for the better, we will not be in Kota Kinabalu before 5PM day after tomorrow. When one does the math, miles to go divided by a reasonable average speed, it is even later than that.

After the grey start, it is a sunny day with beautiful blue, calm, shallow seas, but the problem is the current. He is hoping the sea conditions will change in our favor, but he will let us know tomorrow. So we may lose another port on this leg. There are some really unhappy campers right now. These aren’t our first missed ports but it is still disappointing sometimes.

At cards this afternoon we make another layered card. They really are pretty and easy to make. The staff is the recipient of much of this work in the way of thank you notes. When asked what we will make tomorrow, Julie says a Navigator cruise memory card and laughs! This gets Carolyn to thinking the rest of the afternoon about what she could put on the card as memories for the world cruise so far. Of course, there are pictures of all the wonderful port visits, but then a cork comes to mind, when we lost power due to bad fuel, a swirling mud puddle, when we ran aground due to a careless fisherman...what else memorable could happen? Well, Dick suggests we haven’t seen a fuel lighter since Perth and we have been fighting a strong current and head wind the whole day with some 800 miles yet to go...Hummmm. She thinks she will give this line of thought a rest! This cruise has truly been an adventure so far.

On a brighter note we have dinner in Prime 7 and have another great meal. Dick has prime rib and Carolyn has crab cakes. We top this off with the Cline Zinfandel we like.
We stop and listen to Clive in the Navigator Lounge for a few minutes, but we are asleep on our feet so head on to bed.