Stuck on a Cruise Ship Part 2.

 Getting into the 'Life at Sea' Groove

Shortly after sunset in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean

  It has been almost a week and a half since setting sail from Cape Town. In my last post I wrote about being denied entry into Cape Town, even though I had a ticketed international flight. In fact all of the crew, minus a few from South Africa, had to stay onboard and shove off the dock with the only direction and destination being 'North'.

   So now, after ten days, how has the situation developed? Well for the first week everyone had to adjust to a slower paced, more behind the scenes workload since we have no guests onboard. We did get access to a few of the guests areas like the top deck which has been a godsend. Our first known destination was Gibraltar in mid April. That has since changed to Tenerife, Canary Islands on April 15th. We still don't know what kind of reception we will get when we arrive but it is a little closer to our current location so it shaves a couple days off our travel time.

  The fact that there is no guests onboard, and no virus onboard, means that we can still have large group gatherings. And for the first time ever, all the different departments can come out of the woodwork. Engineers and 2nd cooks are sitting with me for meals or maybe a ping pong match who I've never seen before. It is a rare opportunity to unite the crew as a whole, especially since we are all dealing with this crazy situation together.

   I have been putting together classes to enrich the crew, from self defense to star gazing. We can see the southern sky constellations as well as many of the northern ones as well. The sky is very clear at night, as we are smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. If you want to find us on a map, try and locate Ascension Island.... we passed by it early this morning and it is slowly fading out of sight behind us. Our route has us following the mid Atlantic oceanic ridge, which is where two giant tectonic plates are spreading apart on the ocean floor. We are still staying far off the coast of Western Africa to avoid any confrontation with pirates.

  I talk with Heidi, Catalina, and Fisher on the daily with the help of WhatsApp and some amazing satellite internet onboard. Amazing that we have it, not amazingly fast. But it does the job. I try and find the silver lining of being surrounded by one of the rarest environments in the world, virus free and no chance for introduction of the virus. We are probably some of the very few people in the world who are still living like before Covid 19 existed. But I constantly have my family in my mind and can't wait to be reunited with them as soon as possible.

  In the meantime I'll continue to take advantage of what I can here, because who knows how long before these ships are sailing with guests again.

*If you want to follow along with our route north, the best tracking website I found is www.cruisemapper.com
  I am on the Silver Cloud, although you can find cruise ships from all companies. I even see a couple of the small UnCruise boats on there. At the moment it looks like a migration of salmon all swimming upstream to the same spot. It makes me wonder how crowded little Tenerife will be when we get there.