Wanderung 19

Meandering the Mediterranean

Transatlantic Cruise

April - May 2009

Monday, April 6th, 2009, At Sea

Bob:

Trying to keep in a modicum of shape, I walked for 5 miles or a little over on the promenade deck after breakfast. Although a bit narrow in spots, the promenade deck had a lot of broad areas where passing the slower moving folks was easy. That made it far easier to keep up a steady, 4-mile-per hour pace that I was striving for. I overtook most of the folks walking the deck although there were 3 or 4 people faster than I, including a woman who was power-walking at a clip just under a jog.

Just as many people now "double-dip" on the use of their time by talking on a cell phone while driving a car, I tried to double-dip by singing at the top of my lungs while walking. Inspired by being on a ship, I tended to spontaneously sing a mix heavily loaded by sea shanties, which I enjoy tremendously. Singing while hiking improves my breath control, I think, and certainly requires a good deal of concentration so that I really don't notice the time flying by. I'm not sure how other passengers take this, although I have only had positive comments from my fellow walkers, but I take pains to avoid singing where other folks are lounging on the deck chairs. That would be as rude as walking around with a boom box turned up, in my opinion. Being early in the morning, the air was cool (which made it just great for exercising!) and most folks were lounging about on the sunny side of the ship, so I mostly sang as I walked on the shady side.

Up at the bow on the Noordam, the promenade went through kind of a tunnel in the steel hull of the ship from one side to the other. The reverberation in that tunnel was just fantastic and it was one of my favorite places to bellow out a song. The booming echoes of my voice in tunnels like that always fascinate me. The stern, in contrast, was really pretty noisy with all the swish of the propellers right below the transom and bubbling noises from the wake that all tended to drown out my voice. That was not necessarily a bad thing, of course, especially if I was off key, so I saved the stern for practicing the pieces I was unsure about or hadn't quite mastered so that no one would have to hear me singing sharp or flat. I really wanted to ask the Noordam's professional singers if there was a practice room somewhere on board where I could sing without worrying about making mistakes, but I never got around to it.

The morning breakfast meeting in the Vista Lounge (theater) was with Colin, Jesse, Scott, and Craig from the Unexpected Boys group that had performed two days back. I was happy to hear that they were going to put on another show featuring broadway musical numbers later in the cruise. The audience was full of questions about their background and how the group was composed. All four guys were based in New York and had extensive song and dance experience, of course, as they were professionals, but their technical training varied from musical conservatory to university theater and music majors to mostly apprentice-based learning. The exact foursome was new in that Craig had just joined before the ship left Ft. Lauderdale, but that was fairly typical as the Unexpected Boys was essentially a group composed as necessary for the particular schedule of a cruise ship. The manager apparently picks performers who are free for that period from a much larger roster of tenors, baritones, and basses who had all been selected and pre trained for the shows performed by the group.

I finished the morning bringing my journal up to date on Baby while watching the ship's wake flow out to the horizon from our veranda. Monika attended a class on how to make those creamy cold fruit soups that I was enjoying so much on the Noordam (bless her heart!). After that it was "lights out" for an afternoon nap while Monika attended the art auction for some free champagne.

After a short ballroom dance lesson where I even danced with Lois, it was time for the "Navigation Challenge". I was hoping for a good seminar on nautical navigation, but instead it turned out to be a very rudimentary presentation of the basics of dead reckoning, just enough to allow the passengers to compete in a contest to predict the ship's position at each noon fix. Still, I saw how to really use the parallel rulers for the first time, and that plus what I already knew from aeronautical navigation was enough for me to enter the daily contest.

The rules of the contest were simple: We were given the previous noon's latitude and longitude plus course and speed information along with any planned course or speed changes. From that information plus the prevailing current chart and the prevailing wind information we were supposed to predict the position for noon the following day. I'm not used to working with nautical charts at all, so it turned out to be quite a learning experience when I turned my hand to it in the ship's library after a very quiet dinner with just the two of us on the Lido deck (Lois and Phyllis were using their coupons for free dinners in the fancy-shmancy Pinnacle Grille). Working with another guy who seemed to have the knack of using the parallel rulers, I got an estimate of 33 degrees 35' North latitude and 53 degrees 25' West longitude. But that was a straight time-speed-distance calculation without taking into account the ocean currents, so the next morning I checked the ship's position on the display in the library and revised my prediction to be 33 degrees 15' North and 52 degrees 30' West longitude, which was the predicted position I finally entered into the daily contest.

Copyright 2009 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Prolog Map of Transatlantic Cruise Map of Northern Italian Bus Trip Map of Eastern Mediterranean Cruise Epilog

April 2009
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