Sunday 18 December 1983 – At Sea Day #2
I was awake
about 06.00 and my companions were stirring by 06.30. both said they felt fine
despite the fact that we were still plunging away. Quite an interesting
movement actually: calm sailing then a small plunge followed by three
increasingly larger ones. This series repeated on and on in rotation. It wasn’t
quite as rough as it was during the night because the spray wasn’t flying past
the porthole and the bow wasn’t making quite so much noise when it hit the big
waves.
Matt and I
decided to go up on deck to have a look around at about 07.00 since the sun was
well up. Donning our warm weather gear we had a good bit of exploration and
visited some of the decks we had not seen before. It was pretty nippy despite
the watery sun and we had some sympathy for the jogger who was running with a
pair of rugby socks on his hands.
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| Matt relaxing in a lounge note the iced windows |
We stopped
off at the Lido Deck for a cup of coffee and a Danish. Quite amazing how many
people were up and about at that time. Then we went below only to find that Rab
was not feeling too hot again. I said that I thought the best thing for her to
do was to get out of the cabin and into a steadier part of the ship. We
chivvied her along and sat her in the Double Down Room munching her dry
crackers as we went into breakfast. She didn’t even put on any make-up which
shows how bad she must have been feeling. Once again a most pleasant meal,
marred only by the Moaner rabbitting on about her cabin companion getting up at
06.00 and waking her.
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| Matt as The Inctredible Herb |
Rab was
feeling a bit more sprightly when we got back to her – or at least well enough
to do a little shopping. So we browsed around the shops for a while – they have
some pretty nice stuff in them. We had to go below in the end to get our cabin
and ourselves tidy.. Rab felt a bit queasy, but not too bad, so we went to
watch a video of the QEII cruise to the Pacific last year. After that I was
trying to catch up with this journal while Matt and Rab were distracted by the
band and the singers/dancers rehearsing for tonight’s show. We also had a
caricature done of Matt by the resident artist – as The Incredible Hulk – and
very good it is – I might have one done for myself tomorrow.
Despite the
rough seas – which one feels noticeably in the restaurants because they are
well forward – a good lunch was had by all. We sat in one of the lounges where
it was warmer and watched the bridge players getting more and more annoyed by
what appeared to be a fault in the public address system, which every now and
then allowed a burst of pop music to escape. Very distracting for them of
course, but very amusing to watch. Actually the same thing had beeen happening
during the band rehearsal and drove them to distraction.
There was an
interesting film about the demise of the superliner (yet another example of ‘experts’ being absolutely wrong in their
predictions!) so I went to that while Matt and Rab had afternoon tea with
English John – and no doubt gossiped about the Moaner. We then met up and went
to Bingo. Matt had not been too keen to go, but when the first house produced a
prize of $101, he was much more interested. The snowball jackpot closed at $281
so no doubt we’ll be back tomorrow.
Rab is at an
art lecture as I bring this up to date, so we’ve had a pretty full day. We went
down to change for dinner after Rab’s lecture finished as everyone felt quite
well. Rab developed a bit of tummy trouble which made the evening a bit
uncomfortable for her, but we watched the cabaret until about 23.30. It wasn’t
much cop actually. The opening act was the crowd we had watched rehearsing
earlier in the day. The lead singer had to actually read his lines when
rendering a Noel Coward number. They were followed by a Country and Western man
with his big guitar. He was OK but not brilliant. Rab and Matt swallowed their
pills and we went off to bed.
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| Dressed (warmly) for dinner - note ice on window! |
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