Saturday, February 17, 2018

February 14, 2018 - Valentines Day at Sea in a Storm

Wednesday, February 14, 2018
So much for well laid plans. The weather forecast was no better than ours at home. We awoke to 75 knot winds. That is 80 to 85 miles per hour. The waves were 25 to 30 feet with enormous troughs.

We attended the second astronomy lecture. It was even better than the first. Then we moved to America’s Test Kitchen for a presentation on chocolate. We learned a lot about chocolate and how to make chewy brownies. The handouts were superb, and Abbey, the presenter, was excellent. She explained the whole process as she did it. I never would have guessed how easy it was. It also helped that she told us why the ingredients were important to use in the quantities laid out in the recipe. They execute these recipes hundreds of times in the Test Kitchen in order to refine the techniques for us to use at home. The only sad thing was that we could not taste the outcome due to stringent health regulations. I will just have to try it at home I know Alice will not mind.

After bobbing and weaving our way through the storm for hours, the captain announced at lunchtime that the Gala Evening and Valentine’s Day Ball scheduled for tonight were cancelled. That meant formal attire for tonight was optional, but he discouraged the women from wearing high heels.

A couple of hours later the captain announced that the winds were not going to let up for quite a while. As a result he was going to heave to. Sean will appreciate what that means. For the rest of us it meant that he would point the ship into the wind and ride out the waves at about 3 knots. This gave him just enough speed to maintain steering control. It should improve our comfort, but would impact our schedule.


We set our clocks back 30 minutes tonight, and retired at 10:00. We were tired from walking so carefully today. I woke up at 1:00AM. We were still bucking and travelling slowly. I woke again at 3:00. It was now a pretty smooth ride, and our speed had increased significantly.

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