Day 73 At Sea

Hopefully we are finished with monsoons for a while. Today we had fantastic weather. It was very sunny, warm with a nice breeze. We passed a fairly large land mass today which was the Nicobar Islands( doesn’t show up on my GPS). The only downside for the day was having black ash and soot raining down on us the whole day. If you get some of that on your clothes forget it…. It is just about impossible to get out. I asked the front desk if there was anything that could be done but… alas, no response yet (too late now for today). They are going to have to do a major cleaning effort on the aft deck and furniture before people come out in the morning or they will just get black smudges all over their clothing. Hopefully we won’t have the same situation tomorrow. Normally, I generally only see this occasionally when we are in port with no breeze, not when you are sailing at 18-19 knots. I would love to see some of the officers in their white uniforms come outside of the aft section of deck 7 and hang out for a while ( that was an evil thought… just kidding). My thought is that if there truly is nothing that can be done about the ash & soot raining down, they should, as a minimum, make announcements to the guests that tells them that ash & soot are coming out of the stack and raining down on the aft decks. It would at least give them a heads up to not wear anything light that can stained with black smudges. I will be wearing all black for tomorrow….. Tonight I am blowing off dinner. It is an Informal night and I just don’t feel like wearing a jacket. The dress code isn’t enforced very well so it isn’t worth the effort to put on a jacket when I don’t really like to in the first place….. Amazing that I love Formal nights so much…. I was at a cocktail party in the Queen’s Lounge one formal night and there was a guy just wearing a Batik shirt, not even a jacket…. So sad. They get so many people of these Grand Voyages these days that want it to be like sailing like NCL’s Freestyle cruising…. A lot of the luster of Grand Voyages is disappearing. It is too bad….. The Grand World Voyage continues to cook right along with great food & service. I can’t say enough about how great the staff are….. As far as today went, it was a great day marred only by smudges…. This was the first of our three days at sea on our way to Cochin, India.