Day 49: 20231111 Saturday November 11, 2023- At Sea for late arrival to Freemantle
Although it seemed like the winds calmed a bit with the Windy App showing predicted winds of 35kts at 9pm, the ship did not leave Geraldton until 5am this morning. The seas are bumpy, but not nearly as bad as they were from Cape Flattery to San Francisco, when one of the promenade deck windows shattered on the Grand Princess. There are white caps and 9’ swells, which the ship seems to be handling well.
Sea sickness bags are out by all the elevators, and the hallways are less crowded, so some passengers may be a bit green behind the gills. The outside temperature is a perfect 70˚F with 59% humidity, but the promenade deck is closed due to sea and wind conditions. The pool deck is plenty windy, and the pools are closed due to the wave action.
At times over the last 2 days, we have smelled wet paint or varnish solvents in our stateroom. There must be some painting around the air intakes going on. Fortunately, with the outside temperature now ideal for comfort, we are simply able to leave our balcony wide open. We just have to make sure to close it before opening the inside passage door or a wind tunnel effect rips through the room.
The Captain announced that due to weather and the need for passenger turnaround in Freemantle/Perth, that although the ship is expected to arrive in Freemantle at around 8pm, it will not be disembarked until the following morning, a day behind schedule. Passengers may apparently go ashore after the ship docks at night, but since November 11 is a national holiday (Memorial Day) shops and restaurants will either be closed or impose additional holiday service charges. Excursions that had been booked for today in Freemantle and Perth will be rescheduled to take place on November 12 where possible. They wouldn’t want to miss out on that revenue after all. But the bad news is that in order to make up time and arrive in Adelaide in time for passenger embarkation and disembarkation, the Busselton and Albany ports of call have been cancelled, so we will miss all the southwestern Australian ports of call.
Morning trivia was crowded with the Universe lounge nearly filled. With just Janet, Ben, and Sharon playing, we tied for highest score with 16, but lost on the tie breaker which was how many seats does the O2 Arena have. We guessed 35K, but it was 20K. The other teams guessed 16K and 60K.
They did have a moment of silence at 11am followed by taps on the overhead PA system for Memorial Day. The ship had a formal memorial service yesterday anticipating that the ship would be busy with turn over at port today.
We have been sailing within 20 miles of the Australian coast and have had some Australian cell phone reception. Ben received notification of pending expiration of his SIM card in a week. It’s hard to believe we’ve been in Australia for nearly a month, but Ben spent some time getting that sorted out so our internet access won’t be interrupted while we’re still in Australia. The ship’s internet has been very slow with between 1 an 2 MBPS speed.
We did ourselves proud in the afternoon Progressive trivia scoring a perfect 20, winning the session and holding our lead. After dinner, we dashed down to the Universe Lounge for Flags trivia. We tied a team right behind us with some young people who said one of the girls was a flag savant. We all won string bags for that.
The Princess Theater production was “What the World Need Now”. We again ended sitting next to the choreographer who said this was this cast’s second time performing this show. It is what they call a “Box Show” in that it requires little in the way of sets and props so that it can easily be transferred between ships, and it is generally reserved for the World Cruise itineraries. It goes back and forth between the Island Princess and Coral Princess. Since we had what amounted to an extra day at sea because of weather, they were able to pull this show out of the box for us. Even though the show is, as the choreographer coined it, a low production values, high portability show, it was entertaining and the vocals were better suited to the vocal ranges of the singers, so they sounded better overall than in some of the other shows.
We ended the evening with Beatles music trivia. There were two Beatles early covers of other artists works that were pretty obscure (not in any Beatles greatest hits compilations) that threw us. One we almost got but missed by a word (Little Child vs Little Girl) and the other was a Chuck Berry song Too Much Monkey Business that was covered in the live BBC Pop Go The Beatles broadcasts and released as a digital download album in 2013 “Bootleg Recordings 1963. No wonder we had never heard it before. A gay couple sitting in the back of the room claimed the bottle of ship champagne with a perfect score.
We arrived in Freemantle while having our dinner, and the gangways opened at 8pm. Some passengers are getting off to see the nightlife off the ship. The climate is much better suited to us with 70˚F temperature and 45% humidity- down right nice. We have a full day excursion tomorrow to see the highlights of Freemantle and Perth so we’ll hit the sack.
