At Sea - February 2 - 3

We are quite settled into the cruise life-style and look forward to our at sea days.  The Groundhog seeing his shadow doesn’t seem to matter much when the ship changes your weather as it sails.  The ship left Cabo and experienced sea temps of 82 and an air temp of 78 yesterday.  Today the temperature is cooling down as we steam northward alongside California.  Our sea temp this afternoon is 64 and the air temp is 66.  The captain is expecting to steam under Golden Gate Bridge around 4:30 am tomorrow and to dock in San Francisco at Fisherman’s Wharf at 5:30 am.

Yesterday there was a very clever comedy set-up like a radio show called “Dick Barton, Special Agent.”  Five actors played at least 15 characters with accents and sound affects to help bring the story to life.  Quite good!

Last night was the last Formal night before this segment ends.  The dining room did a nice recognition of the servers, waiters, sommelier and chefs.  There are over 12,000 meals prepared daily.  In the main dining room, there are 48 servers, 48 waiters, 7 head waiters, 15 sommeliers and 28 chefs in total serving about 2,000 guests across two seating times.

The seas are rougher along the California coast with sunny skies and glistening water.  No whale sightings today and only a few birds.  We recently steamed by the Channel Islands, off Los Angeles. 

The lectures the last two days have been provided by Bruce Chadwick, who writes books and appears on the History Channel.  His talks are about murders – techniques, history of forensics and today a brief history of when newspapers and media began to report on murders and why.  Murder is not exactly an uplifting topic and yet he says there is a fascination about ‘who done it’ stories that has existed throughout history.  For example, did you know that public hangings were held starting in the late 1600’s and by the late 1700’s, in England, sometimes over 30,000 people would attend?  Public hangings were finally outlawed in 1830’s because the crowds were becoming so unruly that more people were being killed in the crowd than were being hung.

The rumor heard today is that over 1300 people will disembark/embark at San Francisco while the 600 or so of the World Cruisers stay on their voyage.  It is nice to not have to disembark tomorrow!  We are definitely looking forward to our stop in San Francisco, with access to phone service and high-speed internet for a day – children must be called and more books will be downloaded!