20191121 Thursday, November 21, 2019; At Sea Aqaba to Abu Dhabi Day 3- Entering THE DANGER ZONE
We are working our way eastward, and had to set the clocks forward an hour yesterday. That makes getting up a little harder, but what the heck, we’re on a cruise. We did manage to get to the dining room in time for a sit down, but we are finding it necessary to curtail our selections or we’ll have to buy new clothes before the end of the cruise. It’s so easy to order all the things you would normally crave, but we have had just about everything in excess.
Our sea day routines generally involve lots of trivia’s, and today was no exception. Our usual teams did meet for the morning and progressive trivia games. We found that we are not doing that well. There is lots of competition with about 25 teams. As of this morning the leaders had 32 points (3 teams tied). We had 27 points. There are about 15 teams below our score and 9 teams above.
We finished 2 points off the lead for the morning trivia and one point off the leads for afternoon and evening trivias.
Between the trivia games, we did get in some exercise walking the promenade, and Ben also used the fitness center and the pool near the fitness center which looks like it’s part of the Spa, but is actually accessible to all passengers. It tends to be less used because people don’t know it’s open to all passengers, so Ben was actually able to swim laps without running into bobbing or drifting non-swimmers. The two main pools tend to be jammed with bobbing non-swimmers who can’t grasp the concept of leaving a lane open for swimmers to actually swim in.
The outside temperatures were around 100 degrees with 80+% humidity during the day, and even at 11PM, the temperature is 85 degrees with 81% humidity. Swimming in the outdoors pools is fine with these temperatures, but just sitting around outside is not comfortable unless you are a real thermophile.
One advantage of this weather is it takes no time for clothes to dry out on the balcony. We do have laundry service, but it takes 3 days to get things back so work out clothes and swim wear are easy enough to rinse out in the sink and then dry on the balcony for daily use. We string some parachute cord across the top of our balcony and bring a few clothes pins to keep things from blowing off the line.
The Princess Theater show was Chas Burnett, a comedian who knocked out one liners in rapid succession while occasionally strumming a guitar to sing out some songs with altered lyrics. It was a little like the old Jack Bennie, Bob Hope or Rodney Dangerfield standup. Unfortunately, he was not microphoned up properly and spoke a little too quickly, so it was hard to hear many of his jokes. Ben laughed at the occasional funny quip while Janet slept through the better part of the show. We had showed up early and got good comfortable seats.
We finished off the evening playing a Movie Trivia. We thought it would be movie themes, but it turned out to be both a trivia quiz (20 questions) and five name the movie from the soundtrack music. We got beat by one point.
As the Sapphire Princess headed towards the exit of the Red Sea, we began to see a lot more marine traffic since all traffic moving from the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean must squeeze through a very narrow strait between Yemen and Djibouti and Somalia. There was a brief security announcement with the noon navigation briefing over the PA reminding us that there are still coalition naval forces in the area, even if we are not being actively escorted, and that the ship is in constant contact with British Naval resources. To enhance security, the promenade deck will be closed from 10PM until 7AM so that the deck can be blacked out to allow security personnel to use night vision equipment. So far, so good. As of 11PM, we are past the narrowest part of the strait and headed into the Gulf of Aden, and it is pitch black outside with some low fog in the distance. Hopefully any pirates are drunk or asleep at this time.
