13 - 10/14/2021 - At Sea to the Panama Canal - 2nd Day

Being relaxed on the ship is hard work. The 7:45am alarm jarred me awake, but I took no action to start the day for another half hour.  That gave me enough time to shower and then eat a nice very rote breakfast in the Lido.  It's so predictable that I just have to show up at the egg station and the server barks my order to the cook and she prepares my single sausage patty, fried potato cake, and raw salmon with onions, tomatoes, & capers.  Shortly after this the cook adds my two cooked medium over broken eggs to the plate before handing it to me. I add a glass of diluted cranberry juice and go find a table nearby.  Another server bring s me water and hot green tea and one sweet & low.  It's been my routine this cruise for 13 days and is likely to continue for 10 more days.  And this cruise pattern is a continuation of many previous cruises.

 

After eating breakfast I took my tea and snagged a sticky bun and headed for the coffee chat in the BBKing lounge where Angela had saved me a seat.  This morning's chat was with Fred More, the comedian.Fred was an engaging storyteller about his career.  Afterwards I stayed in the lounge to put some wildlife pictures on my laptop to show Ross. His wildlife Q&A session started 1/2 hour later and it was well received with lots of questions about the booby birds.

 

There were no other programs of interest to us, so I returned my laptop to the room and went to my photography position on the port side forward on deck three.  I spent about 1 1/2 hours standing there but didn't shoot many pictures as the light wasn't just right and the masked white boobies were doing much of their fishing on the starboard side in too sunny of photographic conditions.  I figured the photographic conditions would be better in the afternoon.

 

About 12:30pm we took a break for a very light lunch as we had reservations in the Pinnacle Grill at 5pm.  After lunch I resumed my shooting position and was immediately and fully rewarded with a full afternoon of picture taking.  Today it was the white masked booby birds that were the  prevalent hunters and there were lots of them.  These masked booby birds hunted like torpedo bombers skimming the surface of the water before suddenly diving after their prey.  On balance, they were very successful and so was my photography.

 

At one point I was trying to take a picture of birds coming up after a dive and when I looked at the results there was a large turtle in the picture I didn't see in the moment of the shot.  Cool!  A little later I happened to catch some splashing action towards the stern and started blindly shooting.  In the end, when I reviewed my pictures, I had captured a large dolphin midair heading away from us.  There were several other turtles that floated by but I didn't get any pictures of them as they are usually by my vantage point before I recognize them for what they are.  This is especially true with the the ship moving at 16-17 knots.

 

We ate one of our complementary specialty dinners in the Pinnacle Grill.  It was good and when chef Steve came by to thank us for coming he realized we were the ones he cooked the blackened ahi for last week and surprised us.  We once again profusely thanked him for his thoughtfulness.  He said it was the talk of the Grill as my wife had turned in a comment card expressing our gratitude.  Good job Chef Steve.  You deserve the praise!

 

This evening's Main Stage entertainment was vocal impressionist Trish Kelly.  She was good and one energetic lady. Afterwards we watched the American songs set at Lincoln Center Stage.  It was great.  We ended the evening at Billboard online where Brian & Melissa performed songs by artists from outside the US but were popular here.

 

I will comment that the internet has been slow to non-existent much of the day and evening which is a significant change from earlier days of this cruise..

 

Well, that's what being relaxed on our second sea day approaching the Panama Canal was like.  It's downright tiring just to write about it.  Stay tuned for day three of being relaxed as we get closer to the Panama Canal.



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