Moorea, French Polynesia Sunday February, 17

Moorea.....

Well, you know that rain I was talking about yesterday.....It turned into a tropical storm. 
We were supposed to leave Papeete at 5am this morning, but the captain had to wait for the wind to die down a bit before he could attempt to leave the dock. Moorea is only a short sail away, (maybe 2 hrs for a big ship if you go slow) so delaying an hour or two was not going to impact things very much. 
We woke up around 6:30am and looked out the window. Rain was hitting our window sideways, the waves were crashing, and the ship was listing from side to side and up and down. This did not look good at all, and I knew that we were not going to land. While we were having breakfast at 8:30, our scheduled landing time, we noticed that the ship was not preparing to anchor. We were not slowing down and the tenders were not getting ready. The captain came on the loudspeaker and informed us that since the winds were at 50-60mph, the sea swells were 20 to 30 ft and we had to cross a shallow reef to anchor in the bay, we were going to skip the Island. It was just too dangerous and the storm was not going to let up until late afternoon. This is a tender port, so it would have been almost impossible and dangerous to tender over to the landing platform on the island. So we continued on to Bora Bora which is our next port on the agenda. Needless to say, the staff had to scramble and get some daily activities going for the passengers on-board that can't or refuse to amuse themselves during sea days. 
 We should arrive around 5pm tonight and be able to tender ashore if the seas die down. We will be there until 11pm tomorrow, so hopefully we will have plenty of time to explore. But best of all, since this was an unplanned sea day...I am caught up with the blog.  

We have sailed a total of 8210 nautical miles (1 nm=1.15 miles) been on the ship for 27 days, visited 6 countries, 9 ports of call, and suffered through at least 9 time changes. I think the best is yet to come......
huge swells

Spray hitting our window....we are almost mid-ship



Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 17, 2019 at 8:49 PM

    Hope you are having a great time. Those seas would be a challenge for me! Lon

    ReplyDelete
  2. EJ @AKFebruary 18, 2019 at 8:57 AM

    Have you had a chance to drop a line and do some fishing? :)

    ReplyDelete

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