Day 26 - 11/01/23 - At Sea to Puntas Arenas, Chile

 It was a lazy day at sea today as we made our way south.  The first part of the day was spent in the open sea with slightly choppy water and we spent from about 4pm until 9pm in a Chilean fjord with its calm waters and cruising at 15 knots.


One thing about these sea days that's tiring for me is that we have our devotional gathering at 8am which requires being up for breakfast even earlier.  This I'm not very used to.


In the morning we spent 4 straight hours in gatherings and presentations.  First was our interdenominational devotional time where our leader showed a brief video about his ministry and we then talked about his ministry to seafarers.  It was really interesting.


Jeremy interviewed Carolina, our presenter from Colombia whose last presentation is tomorrow.  She has an interesting background and talked about the challenges of presenting to an English speaking audience when her native and research language is in Spanish.  It's also her first time on a cruise ship and she really likes it.  


The Shore Excursions manager presented a talk about the upcoming ports which was okay.  She was followed by Tom Holtz who gave a nice presentation on. Captain James Cook.  In the afternoon our only lecture was by Carolina who spoke.about Ferdinand Magellan and Charles Darwin.   I worked on getting my blog updated and also signed up for the photography contest.  


For this contest, each participant can only submit one entry in one of 4 categories:  Landscape, wildlife, portraits, or something out of the ordinary/box.  Submissions will be done on 11/08/23 with all passenger/crew voting on 11/14/23. While I was there, I watched a cornhole tournament.  There were some seriously good players there.


We decided to eat dinner in the Canaletto (Italian) tonight and there were only 3 couples there for most of the time.It's also worth noting that the menu has changed and eliminating the seafood stew and the calamari.  Per our server, the change was made a month ago, and we expressed our disappointment at dropping the soup, and we were not the only ones with that complaint.  The meal charge is now $25 per person which is up from a sub $20 charge.  Of course, for us it's free as a 5 star mariner benefit. 


After dinner we went up to the Crow's Nest and secured a pair of front row seats and watched scenic cruising for a little over an hour before watching Mike Robinson's last comedian show with his buddy, Terrance. It was another good show.  We then went back up to the Crow's Nest to watch scenic cruising for another hour as sunset came and we re-entered the Pacific Ocean.  



Our evening ended while watching game 5 of the World Series which was won by Texas convincingly.

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