Friday, November 22, 2019; At Sea Aqaba to Abu Dhabi Day 4. Sailing between Somalia and Yemen

Friday, November 22, 2019; At Sea Aqaba to Abu Dhabi Day 4.  Sailing between Somalia and Yemen

This was supposed to be our 4th day at sea, but unscheduled medical evacuations have shortened that to 2 days at sea without touching land.  Even though none of the passengers other than those evacuees got off the ship, we were in the Port of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for 5 hours, so that felt like a real port day.  

Sneaking by last night through the strait separating Djibouti and Yemen at flank speed and obscured by darkness and a low cloud layer appears to have made us an unlikely target in an otherwise target rich environment.  Our ship is able to sail past much of the freighter traffic.  I tried to look out over the seas last night with binoculars, but couldn’t see more than a few hundred yards due to the fog and spray.  The winds funnel through this strait creating pretty rough conditions for pirates in small vessels.  Today, we are now out in the more open Gulf of Aden, and as of 4PM, we were about to slip east of the Horn of Africa.  

The temperatures are a little cooler in the Gulf of Aden.  At 4PM it was 83 degrees on our balcony.  The skies are hazy but there are only scattered clouds.  The wind is brisk blowing at 30-40 knots and we are surrounded by white caps and 4 foot seas.  It sure is nice to be in a ship as large as this, which handles heavy seas so well.  

Our trivia team managed to pull it together to take home a win with the morning trivia.  We had a perfect score.  Bob gets credit for knowing what Frodo lost immediately before losing the Ring, and also knowing what kind of flowers Mary Poppins wore in her hat.  We also did better at the progressive trivia scoring 18/20 or possibly 19 if the host will accept our answer of Carbon for the question of what material is generated when a diamond is cut with a laser.  His answer was graphite.  Prior to today’s installment, our team was tied for 7th out of 26 teams.  Hopefully today’s performance will move us up in the rankings.

Ben hit the fitness center and pool while Janet watch the movie “Yesterday” which has the novel premise of someone who becomes the only person in the world who remembers the Beatles after a worldwide blackout.  Ben discovered that the Neptune pool (main open air pool) was dirty with bits of paper and other litter drifting around the bottom, so future swims will be in the Lotus spa pool.  

We were back to our more usual selves in the afternoon trivia where me missed the win  for not knowing what marine animal eats itself when stressed, or what country the Rosslyn Chapel that was visited in the DaVinci code movie was in.  The winning team had a perfect score.  

There was an Elite lounge reception featuring sushi, so we did that plus a soup run to the buffet for a quick dinner before the evening “Who or Where in the World Am I” trivia.  In this game, three hints for each answer, which could be a city or a person, are given.  If you submit an answer after the first hint and get it right, you get 3 points.  If you wait for a second clue, you get 2 points, and after a 3rd clue, you get one point.  But if you guess wrong, you get zero, and can’t submit additional guesses for the round. 

For example, the first clue was “Location of the St. Bartholomew massacre”.  The second clue was “Hosted a World’s Fair exposition in 1889”, and the final clue was “Home of tourist attractions including the Arc d’ Triumph”.  We got 3 points for submitting Paris after the 1st clue.  At the end of the game, we tied with one other team for first place and each team got a bottle of champagne.  So it was nice to end up with two wins today.

We wound up the evening with a Princess Theater Showtime Tribute to Nat King Cole by Donny Ray Evins.  He put on a good show singing songs by Nat King Cole backed by the Sapphire Princess Band, but during the second half of the show, walked around in front of the stage to interact with the audience, but was sweating so badly that he had to borrow someone’s drink napkin to blot the sweat out of his eyes.  That was a bit distracting.  There wasn’t a lot of pizazz or zing to the show, but it did evoke some nostalgia.  

Tomorrow is the second to last sea day before arriving at Abu Dhabi, and will be the second formal night of the cruise.  Ben got his suit and slacks back the morning after the first formal night, so that will be our first for this cruise.  We have heard that there will be lobster on the menu, and we are hoping it will be the good New England lobster that comes out of the shell easily, and not the spiny lobster that you have to struggle to pick out of its shell.  We also see that there will be a James Bond Trivia tomorrow night, so competition should be keen for that one.  Jackie, the woman we did a pool deck music trivia with a few days ago, sat next to us in the theater tonight.  She says her husband is a Bond fanatic- has all the movies on DVD and knows them inside and out.  So we’ll see if we can recruit him for tomorrow night if we have vacancies on our team since Mary and Bob usually don’t stick around for the later events.