March 23rd, 2024

We are finishing up the second of 2 sea days. After 7 days in port everyone is appreciating the downtime and the boat has been very quiet. A large bulk of people got off in Singapore and we have another 40 getting off in Colombo, Sri Lanka and then 30 more in Cochin, India and then 20 more in Cape Town. By the time everyone who wants to get off due to the new itinerary has gotten off we should be down to about 550 which is a little more than half full. You can already feel the difference in the restaurants and in the World Cafe.

We have been sailing due west across the Bay of Bengal which is the largest bay in the world. and it has been very smooth sailing.

We lost a few people from the Mah Jongg group but we also have a couple of new ones that have showed up who want to learn. They have also had felting classes and Kathy has been going and has added to our collection in the room.

Kathy’s dolphin Koala holding a flower

The felting projects are not very big. They are sitting on an envelope for a card to give you and idea of the size.

I went through my dive videos and took out some still shots from it. Again not the best diving we have done but we did see some different things that are not available in our side of the world.

Another tomato clownfish

Here I had 2 trying to hide from me

When I first saw this jelly fish I thought it was a plastic bag. This is the only one we saw on the dive but once we were back on the ship you could see a bunch from the balcony.

This little orange guy was very small and is a juvenile brown box fish We also had a porcupine fish hiding

The color is not the best but I loved these light blue fish

There were plenty of fish just cloudy

These are juvenile domino damsel fish. They hide in coral and also sea anemones

These fish always stay in a group and move together as one. Weird to watch.

More domino damsels hiding in the sea anemone

Lots of small fish on the diving. The dive master said they don’t get anything big like sharks, rays or turtles.

This is a crown-of -thorns starfish. It is very bad for the coral because it preys upon both hard and soft coral. They are hard to kill and all the black spines on them sting. The best way to get rid of them is to inject them with sodium bisulfate which does not harm the coral. When I asked the dive master about what I saw he seemed surprised that one was around and he did not see it.

One more clown fish

This guy was my new personal favorite. It is a juvenile harlequin sweetlips fish. I have never seen one before. It was only about 3 inches long and it was by itself out in the sand and moves around a lot.

Not sure if I will be doing any more dive trips this cruise but we will see.

Last night we had to set our clocks back 1/2 hour so we are now 9.5 hours ahead of east coast. Very confusing when trying to figure out what time it is at home.

Tomorrow we dock in Colombo, Sri Lanka at 2pm. Not sure why so late since we are currently barley moving and seem to be pretty close to Sri Lanka already. We will do an overnight there. We were hoping to do a safari but when the itinerary changed and we went from 3 days down to 1 we do not have enough time to get to the national park.