Today is our first Sea Day.   As far as I can make out, HAL do mariner events on Sea Days, so I thought we may get our special mariner's lunch today.   However, I had forgotten there are other priorities for the first sea day; for example the Wine Tasting where they hope to sell some wine packages.   I bought a wine package as soon as I could, so we could have wine with our meals without waiting for the tasting.   Some people didn't think much to the house wines, but I thought they were OK and the Navigator's package was good value, with some wines that we knew well, Ravenswood Zinfandel for example.   In fact we thought the Navigator's package was better value than the Admiral's package, where the wines were only marginally of better quality, but at quite an increase in price.

This morning was the first gathering of the Cruise Critics Roll Call group, the Meet & Greet for our Cruise. We were hoping to meet someone from the crew as well as the hospitality staff and Holland America did a grand turn out for us, including Captain Albert.   Of course the main purpose was to get to know the other guests, that we partly know already from the bulletin board.   I didn't take any pictures at the meeting as I was shooting video, which was not very succesful due to the general conversation noise.   It is easy for a human to filter out individual conversations at such meetings, but compact cameras with their tiny microphones can never achieve this, as you can hear in this excerpt.   Fortunately, Babara sent me some of her photos, so I hope she doesn't mind if I include one of hers.   That is us with our backs to the camera.

We then needed to fit lunch in so that we would be ready for the Geologist guest speaker at 1:30pm in the Showroom at Sea.   The speaker was Denis St. Onge who worked for the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys and also the Geological Survey of Canada.   He was a member of the original group of the Polar Continental Shelf project.   His talk today was "The Beauty of Tundra" which illustrated the beauty of the regions north of the tree line and explained how to read their history.   Good preparation for our arctic cruise, and even the Faroes where trees are missing, but that's another story we will get to.

I wasn't sure how far out in the North Sea we would be sailing, so I had not prepared any satellite images.   Just as well, as due to the UK gambling laws, and to keep those happy that wanted to use the casino, we had to sail outside the 12 mile limit and so couldn't see the land.   We saw wind farms, oil rigs and some shipping but, apart from some smudges on the horizon, that was all.   The previous evening, once it got dark we could see the coast and could work out where we were by knowing the coastline and counting the large patches of lights where the towns were.   But by the morning I had no clue as to where we were.   I must assume the weather was a bit grey and it was not much good for photography, since we didn't seem to take any.   We have one on the Lido deck, where some of the more hardened cruisers were sunbathing.

We are glad that Holland America keeps up the tradition of towel folding on their cruise ships.   We came across this on our Alaska trip, and wondered if we would get them this time.   We were not disappointed and Made, our steward, was very good at it, making us a different creation for every evening of the cruise.   Later on in the cruise they had a demonstation of towel folding which we went to, and bought their book with 40 designs.   (Their book is good but their web site is not so hot.)

Captain Albert's Blog: Heading North.