EMERGENCY DRILL DAY (AGAIN)
We’re still at sea, and the deadlights on the portholes have remained closed, which is a pity because the sea, despite having a noticeable swell, hasn’t been too rough at all.
Today was also ‘Emergency Drill Day’, two weeks on from the last one. The drill was held at 10:45, right slap bang in the middle of Tracy and Steve’s craft class. Their class started at 10am, but that would realistically only give them about half an hour before people would start thinking about the drill; heading towards their cabins to pick up their life jackets and gravitating towards their respective muster stations.
On the plus side, they didn’t bother with all the ‘filing-out onto the lifeboat deck in a single line’ malarkey, but it still didn’t finish until about ten past 11, after which there wasn’t much of the morning left at all. We’d been late getting up, so by the time 12 noon came around, it only felt like 5 minutes since we’d eaten breakfast. Because of this, we set up the craft room before lunch, rerady for the first class at 2pm.
There was a lot going off this afternoon, which I thought was going to affect attendance, but actually, it turned out I had some good numbers for the ‘Mayan Temple Ruins’ session.
Tomorrow, we were due to be spending the morning in St Vincent, before moving to Bequia in the afternoon. We like both places, but Bequia was a place we were particularly looking forward to, as it is a good place to swim and enjoy some ‘beach-time’. I say ‘was’, because
later in the afternoon, as we drank tea in the bistro, after the class, the captain announced that due to the predicted swell to be outside the ‘acceptable parameters’ for a tender, our visit to Bequia has been cancelled. Instead, we will be arriving a little later at St Vincent, and staying alongside the quay until about 11:30pm. Whether or not the same issue is likely to affect the following day’s scheduled visit to Mayreau remains to be seen. That, too, is a tender port, but it is brilliant because there’s nowt there but beach, and they usually lay on a beach barbeque. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
