{"id":188,"date":"2013-02-03T22:18:51","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T22:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=188"},"modified":"2014-11-24T21:08:24","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T21:08:24","slug":"sunday-at-sea-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/sunday-at-sea-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday – At Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is the first of five sea-days that will bring us to Horta, in the Azores, on Friday. It was back to work today, with me teaching A and B groups all about painting summer trees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After breakfast, before all that, we sat out on the back deck drinking our morning tea and coffee, and gazing out into the open sea. The sun was shining brightly – the weather quite glorious.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In some ways, it’s these quiet, reflective moments that are the most meaningful. My favourite place on the ship is to stand right at the front, and watch the great ocean pass beneath, and around us. It’s a relaxing activity that requires no brainwork, and requres no energy; you just stand and watch the world go by, and feel the wind in your hair. The rest of the time, everything is a bit of a whirl; my first class starts at 11:45, which means being at the craft room for about 11:15 to set up. Classes last an hour, so my second workshop of the day is at 1:15pm. At the end of the last session, it’s a mad dash to clear everything up ready for Michelle to take the room over for her scrapbooking class.<\/span><\/p>\n

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There’s just one key to the Art and Craft room, which has been dubbed (queue heavy reverb and extra bass….) ‘The Key of Power’…<\/span><\/p>\n

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Handing over the key from one crafter to another started out as a straightforward procedure, but as the cruise has gone on, a handing-over ceremony has developed. It keeps getting added to, and various folks have made a point of coming along to the craft room to witness the ceremony with their own eyes. As it stands at the moment, the key-hander and the key-receiver stand facing each other and perform a pirouette. After this, the key is swung over in an arch (similar to a bowler in cricket), and placed meaningfully into the palm of the receiver. Then both parties stand on one leg and lean forward, as if looking out to sea (in a sort of ‘Life on the Ocean Wave’ stance). From this point on, it becomes slightly more abstract; both parties drop suddenly into a kung-fu stance, and emit a suitable martial arts ‘Huh!’, before launching into a rotating Morcambe and Wise ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ dance to finish. It can get to you, this cruising lark…..<\/span><\/p>\n

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After my last class, we grabbed a late lunch, enjoyed 15 minutes at the front of the ship, and then retired back to the cabin for me to do more painting. This morning, I had two paintings on the door, one of The Pitons from the Sea, and one of the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ natural arch, from our catamarran trip in St Vincent the other day. The Pirates arch went instantly, leaving me with yet another space. This afternoon, I’ve painted what must surely be one of my last Boca Do valeria boat scenes – only because I’m starting to run out of fresh source material. Tracey keeps pressurizing me to paint one of the Ile Du Salut monkeys, and I’m also debating whether or not to paint a young indian girl holding a sloth…. both well outside my comfort zone, I have to say!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the first of five sea-days that will bring us to Horta, in the Azores, on Friday. It was back to work today, with me teaching A and B groups all about painting summer trees. \u00a0 After breakfast, before all that, we sat out on the back deck drinking our morning tea and coffee, and gazing out into the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}