March 29, 2025
We were informed by the Captain yesterday morning that there is a cyclone affecting the weather in Sydney on the day we are supposed to dock which is Sunday. For that reason they have taken Sydney off the itinerary. Instead of 2 days at sea we will have 4 days at sea. We will not only skip Sydney but our next stop was supposed to be Townsville, Australia which would have been a new port for us. We are skipping Townsville because it would have been our first stop in Australia and Townsville does not have the ability to do immigration services. So new plan is the 4 days at sea and then dock in Cairns and instead of spending 1 day there we will spend 3 days and 2 nights and that will get us back on the regular schedule. A little disappointing that we won’t go to Sydney but we were just there last year and we will be back again in August. We also were supposed to lose and get quite a bit of crew in Sydney and we guess all that will happen in Cairns now. That means an extra 2 days of work for the crew who thought they were getting off tomorrow.
Sunset over Cape Renga the northern most point in New Zealand.
We had a relaxing day at sea yesterday and I did go to see if we got any new Mah Jongg players and no one else showed up. So I guess no Mah jongg this segment. I may try again today but we have been bouncing around quite a bit and I have been taking extra medicine besides wearing the patch so it has made me pretty sleepy.
We do have the Captain’s welcome aboard party tonight which means free cocktails and then reservations in the steak house tonight.
The excursion crew is working frantically to find more tours for the 3 days in Cairns so we assume that will be out today. We had booked a trip to the Great Barrier Reef independently because it is so much cheaper than what the boat offers but that is on the 3rd day so we need something for the other 2 days.
They did get the pool repaired and refilled with water before we sailed from Auckland although it was a little cool outside yesterday for the pool.