IN THE DOLDRUMS

This morning, it took me almost one whole hour to send two emails and load a simple web page, operations that at home would have took me no more than a few minutes. The ship’s wi-fi can be cranky at the best of times, but today it was running slower than a snail on crutches.

As I watched the little blue circle of death tick away minutes of my life that I will never get back, and hoping beyond hope that the next tiny piece of html – nothing more than a simple block of text or a small image – would appear before my laptop battery gave up the ghost – I realised that a similar thing has happened before, on previous trips.

There’s a sort of an oceanic no-man’s land; a dead zone if you like, where signals are far and few between. Up on deck, the heat was stifling, and the air made all the more humid with an almost total absence of even the slightest whisp of wind.

Welcome to the ‘Doldrums’.

Even the wildlife sightings seemed restricted to flying fish, nothing more; the sea was so deafeningly inactive that even the dolphins couldn’t be bothered to make an appearance.

This afternoon, I had my next two classes (a boat scene), and even the Conference Room seemed noticeably hotter and airless than usual.

Since leaving Bristol, almost two weeks ago, we haven’t seen any rain… until tonight. Unfortunately, the arrival of rain coincided with the ship’s first tropical deck party. Such an event isn’t of much interest to us; instead, we opted for a movie night in the cabin (we’ve been working our way through all the Harry Potter films), but went uptairs for a late night cup of tea before retiring, such is our habit of late. We got there in time to see the entertainments team limboing on deck, and dancing to ‘Aga Doo’, while most of the passengers huddled around the outsides of the deck, protecting themselves from the rain. Typical.