Just another day at sea!  Beautiful weather though, obviously our following seas are still following.  The sun rises, lots of puffy clouds but no rain clouds, breezy and chilly, around 60, but overall a lovely morning.  We do our normal thing – coffee, gym, breakfast, Coffee Chat with Tjalling and today, the Showmen. Oh my God – these guys are just a hoot.  They have the best personalities, are hysterically funny and too totally adorable!  They get along so well together, and they’ve only been together on this cruise – all 3 of them.  Niles – sort of the leader of the 3 – video recorded all of us singing Happy Birthday to his mom.  And then proceeded to just joke and josh and make fun of his cast members and Tjalling – and it is so apparent that they all get along, Tjalling included.  

Then off to a talk entitled “Catching Waves, The Story of Surfing.”  Hmmm…we’ve never seen this before!  Something new – yay.  And very interesting, Tjalling explaining surfing terms, where they came from, what they are (Hang Ten – ok, call me dumb, but I never knew it was how many toes were off the board!), that Hang Loose and Gnarly Waves all refer to Hang Ten.  He talked about River surfing in Munich – what?  It’s a thing!  In the Eisbach River.  How Ocen surfing began in Hawaii, of course.  Explorers reported seeing Tahitians sliding across the waves on the stern of a canoe – it was actually a little small surfboard called the Uma, but still.  An interesting 45 minutes. 

That led up to the cool – calling all geeks – presentation on the Oosterdam refurbishment with the Captain and Hotel GM Colin.  You all know how we are – we eat this stuff up, and it was a great way to learn about all that went on aboard during those 14 days in dry dock.  Accompanied by tons of amazing pictures!  We won’t bore you with it all here – but the amount of stuff they did was astonishing:  215,000 square feet of carpeting (our suite included), balcony furniture replacements, select bathrooms fully renovated, Rolling Stone lounge completely updated with new lights and systems, Lido Market and Canaletto totally refreshed with new furniture, carpet and completely new buffet system – where, as already mentioned, we can’t serve ourselves, but what we didn’t realize was that the bain marie food tray system was replaced with electric heated surfaces to keep the food warm – know we know exactly why we can’t serve ourselves!  Can you imagine the accidents and burns with these passengers?  Oh yes, we can!  And finally, the Sea View aft pool was completely gutted and redone, as was the Lido deck with the elimination of the nacho station.  And that doesn’t even cover it all.  Ok – so we did bore you!  And that was just the Hotel side! 

The Technical/Nautical side was even more amazing – upgrades on so many systems, bow thrusters, azipod updates, stabilizer overhaul, anchor replacement.  A crazy amount of work for 2 weeks.  One of the most amazing things was that they had to cut holes in the hull to get some of the big equipment in and onto the lower service decks.  Wow.  Nuts!  Quite the entertaining time, including the Captain and GM joshing each other about the gym renovation (oh yeah, we mentioned that already, completed renovated with new machines) – even though they tore out all the flooring and replaced it with sound deadening flooring and carpet, you can still hear the weights being dropped. But – and here’s the joshing – they redesigned the gym so that the weights are no longer over the Captain’s quarters, but now are over the GM’s quarters!  Rank has privileges, obviously.  LOL.

The rest of the afternoon was again, our norm:  Lunch in the Lido (we skipped the formal brunch in the dining room), then the 2pm Alex talk about illegal fishing entitled “In Lawless Seas.”  This is a big project for Alex, one he wants his non-profit company Pelagics to focus upon – the IUU:  Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing.  There is a lot of it all over, but focused mainly in Western Africa.  The fishermen use sneaky things as buoys for their illegal lines, such as blow up beach soccer balls, which go ignored by the marine police because it looks like garbage floating, and the police won’t pick up garbage.  Meanwhile the illegal fishermen know to go look for their soccer ball and come back to get the line that is attached to the ball.  They also use Drift Nets, called “walls of death,” because they can be as long as 20km and hang underneath the water targeting tuna and swordfish.  Unfortunately they catch everything else, including endangered species.  And while illegal in the EU since 2002, they still are widely used there and elsewhere, particularly West Africa which is one of the worst areas.

There is precious little down time today after Alex’s talk – it’s a full day for us!  Ed has his haircut at 3, I stay in the cabin charging the phones (the wifi on this ship takes a toll on our battery life) and computer.  Then it is off to the gym early because we have to go to Tjalling’s Q&A on Funchal.  As we said before – it is pure entertainment!  Somebody actually asked how the Hop on Hop Off bus works. 

Dinner was fast again, we were back in the lounge then on the balcony well before sunset.  No show tonight, so TV in the room and then to bed for our day in Funchal.