(Tuesday, May 10th, 2016)
Yesterday was truly “one of those days”. For several days we’d been sailing across the Atlantic, with the Captain saying that it was unusually quiet, but that we were expecting to hit some dicey weather sooner or later.
It truly was quiet for the whole start of the voyage across. Although there were a few whitecaps in view, there were no significant swells, and not a great amount of wind. It was easy for me to jump rope on any deck I wanted, and we walked up to the bow to stare at waves, and to see some birds, some dolphins, and a flying fish. We repeated this for several days. Nice.
We had a long-delayed party on Saturday night, and some hung-over seamen on Sunday morning. Some of them were good at Karaoke. Some. In the interest of maintaining a good relationship with our Captain and Master, I can honestly report that without a doubt he participated in Karaoke. You have not lived until you hear a Pole and a Filipino pair up on a medly of some Beatles love songs.
Sunday night it got rough. We had a lot of everything: Wind, chop, swells. The ship was both rolling and pitching fore/aft, and pounding into large swells. It felt like the worst of the times in the Pacific.
The ship rolled a bit faster and with a bit more angle than in the Pacific, influenced by the fact that it was lighter (we were totally loaded across the Pacific, not so much here) and that the swells were not coming from a uniform direction.
Anyway, we had a sleep-lite night. And then a very interesting breakfast. We knew going in that breakfast was going to be a little challenging. Just pouring coffee was a feat. And we knew that our chairs might slide on the floor a bit. But. The ship rolled violently, and emptied the tables of plates, glasses, everything not in a box. We slid on our chairs until the chairs, along with all the stuff from the tables, found the starboard wall. Wheeee, crash! Then we journeyed, sliding whilst sitting in our chairs, and with all the stuff coming along, to the port wall. We did this a couple of times. “Scrambled eggs” now has an additional meaning to me.
Nobody got hurt, and we all chipped in to help clean up. We made sandwiches for lunch, and we had dinner on plates but we ate standing up. The rest of the day was mostly riding it out. The wind was too powerful to allow any venturing outdoors. I took videos – not of breakfast, but of the waves, wind, and swells. I hope some of them show the power that we sensed. I included one in the folder “Raw Photos>Cooked>Across the Atlantic”. It is a large file so watch out. To help with perspective, you can see an opening in the bottom of one of the middle cranes, lined in grey paint on the green surrounding it. That’s a passageway, about 7 feet tall. Another perspective help: We are riding high. The side of the ship is about 30 feet above the water line.
So although there were fewer rough days in number in the Atlantic, I have to say that all the way across the Pacific our food never escaped the table. So the Atlantic wins in the FoF (Food-on-Floor) roughness scale.
Then in the middle of the night Monday night it all went away. We awoke this morning to find us on relatively flat seas, no huge swells, no whitecaps to speak of, much like the days before. As I write this in the evening we’ve been at full throttle all day, I’ve been up to the bow again for much of the afternoon, and it is as if Monday’s violence never happened. There’s a smashed chair in the mess hall, and a coffee maker that won’t recover from its injuries crumpled in a corner of the galley, just in case we need reminders.