The day started out as a bright, warm day with a slight breeze.

A bit about where we are:

• The Torres Strait is the narrow crossing between the tip top of Australia and the southernmost part of New Guinea.
• As I mentioned yesterday, it is also the place where the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet – so it’s often subject to ‘interesting’ winds/tides/currents. Today we learned a bit about what that means.
• Until quite recently (in geological time), during the last ice age, it was actually dry land, so even today it is quite shallow. Note how green the water is. It’s only about 30 meters deep.
• Because the area is so shallow it contains 274 small islands (only16 of which are inhabited)
• The local inhabitants of these islands are genetically and culturally of Melanesian not Aboriginal descent.
• In the past there was continual inter-island warfare with the Murray Island people known as the fiercest raiders and head hunters.
• British control started in 1862 although Captain Cook had claimed all of Eastern Australia back in 1770.
• The main export in this area was the abundance of pearl oysters, which attracted lots of Japanese pearl divers.
• In WWII the Japanese avoided bombing Thursday Island because of its Japanese population but bombed the next island heavily.
• Large cannons were emplaced on Thursday Island to cover the openings between the islands in case of any Japanese naval assaults on the way to invade Australia.

We were enjoying breakfast on the terrace when the wind started to pick up and chairs started to skitter across the deck. Being at anchor we had a bit of maneuvering ability so they changed the angle of the ship slightly so we were headed into the wind. That sheltered the terrace but…

Noon Report:

• Location: S 10° 34.77′, E 142° 09.13′
• Speed: At Anchor
• Course: At Anchor
• Weather: Cloudy, Occasional Rain
• Temperature: 26º C, 79º F
• Wind: SSE 11 knots, 13 mph

According to my source (for the Noon Report), we’re at anchor. However, just a bit before noon the announcement came over that, because of the sea conditions, we had stowed the anchor and would be ceasing all tender operations. Between then and 2:00 we (somewhat) maintained our position while we went about the process of rounding up everyone who had gone ashore and getting them back on the ship.

Since the tender was fighting both the wind and the waves, it was taking a good 45 minutes of rough riding to get back. Fortunately Cheryl and I had decided not to tender ashore to spend time in the village on Thursday Island. So we basically just stayed out of the wind.

After breakfast we moved next door to the pool deck and staked out a couple of lounges. We read, napped, read, listened to announcements, and read some more. Then it was noon.

Oh…So this is what cruising is supposed to be about. This is MUCH more relaxing than what we’ve been doing.

Following lunch, Cheryl had her rescheduled massage and I futzed around the stateroom for a bit before going down to deck 2 to secure a game table. I was joined shortly by Denny and Pat and eventually by Cheryl. We spent the next couple of hours playing cards and having a fun relaxing time while the ship made its way west.

I’ve mentioned this before but one of the lecturers explained it in a much better way. We are now transitioning from the ‘west’ to the ‘east’. From now to Istanbul (late April) we will be experiencing Asian culture. It will be significantly different from what we have experienced thus far.

The 4:30 lecture today was all about volcanoes:

He did a pretty good job of scaring us. There were 11,000 earthquakes in this region in 2022. He showed a record of earthquakes in the region in the past week – including a 6.5 earthquake this morning in the northern part of Indonesia. This could be an interesting part of the trip.

Cheryl’s Factoid:

• We are entering a very seismologically active area as this is a major subduction zone – the Indo Australian plate is subducting northward under the Sunda plate (which holds all the Indonesian Islands including the Phillipines) at the Sunda-Java trench on the south side of Java.
• All the islands here are volcanic.

At 6:30 we attended a lecture by the Calligraphy instructor. She gave a very high-level view of the history of written text and talked at length about writing styles thru history (but limiting herself to Greek/Roman lines. There’s only so much you can cover in 45 minutes.), tying these developments to the art of calligraphy.

Dinner was followed by BBB (12/28 – It’s a good thing it’s fun. Otherwise we wouldn’t subject ourselves to this much abuse.)

Then it was back to the stateroom to write this up and prepare for tomorrow.

So that’s the day. Cheryl is feeling much better but we’ll be taking it slow for the next couple of days.

Oh, and, we gain another hour tonight. Now that we’re heading west again we’ll probably be doing a lot of that.

See you tomorrow, R