Volendam day Ten Wednesday 2/11/11

Again all at sea and a leisurely start having breakfast in time for Jeremy's run down on the things to do in Burnie Melbourne and Sydney. Quite important as we haven't booked any shore excursions. Mid way through the presentation we had an announcement that the ship had slowed down to render assistance to a suspected inverted yacht, though this turned out to be a dead whale as we got closer. Various presentations and art auctions on the agenda today - everyone trying get us to spend money despite the 'free' draws and raffles. Midday the ships progress map shows us to be over a third of the way with 625 miles to go, and averaging 18 knots. The shipping line is committed to reducing fuel consumption which presumably means we go slower, I seem to recall the last cruise had us doing over 20 knots on some legs. The Captains briefing warned of increasing wind F6 - 7 and 4m swell. What fun. The afternoon was taken up with watching the film Amelia based loosly on Amelia Erhart. The end of that just left us time to join the last 15 minutes of "English High Tea" which bore little relation to high tea as we know it nor even to afternoon tea! Carol had a snooze and I wandered around for a while. Dressed for the formal dinner we went to the 'meet the brits aboard' venue in the Crows Nest and eventually about 20 people turned up. Not many aboard or they didn't want to be sociable. Dinner was quite late as we started after the get together, so we missed outon the show this evening, but it was the usual suspects so I guess we didn't miss too much. The seas were building up so getting about proved a little interesting and sitting sipping post prandial drinks watching people passing by was quite amusing. The night proved to be quite noisy with heavy seas hitting th bows though the motion wasn't too bad for sleeping.