Cruise The World With Us

Friday – March 7, 2025

Today’s World Cruise game was hard. Each team was handed sheets with 60 3-digit airport codes and given 20 minutes to identify as many as possible. If you were a pilot you would have a good chance of getting over 30 but I don’t believe anyone would have been able to answer all 60 correctly. As has been our fate in the past, we finished last with 24 correctly identified. The codes were not just large city airports – the list even included the airport in Mason City, Iowa – a city of 28,000. Take a look and see how many you can identify.

Today’s media begins with sunrise. Since we are headed South our balcony was facing East. That may not happen too often for the next few weeks.

The mountain peak you see after the World Cruise game videos is Mt. Taranaki. It is an extinct volcano that rises to over 8,200 feet above sea level. We sailed by it for quite some time. Long enough – as you can see – for Kelsey to eat several rice balls and slices of honeydew melon.

The captain’s message came on today when I was in our cabin. I recorded it again for you to determine what he says at the end of his status report. This recording is much clearer because there is no background noise. Let me know if you are sticking with your earlier pronouncements of “my little bitty ship” and “my little ship”.

Following the captains status report I took another photo of Mt. Taranaki (tighter on the peak) and a screenshot of it from iMaps. A little later I saw a lighthouse near shore and added it. Don’t know what town it was near.

At 3:00 pm Jan and Kelsey left to view the Master Chef at Sea competition held in the theatre. This competition was to narrow the contestants from 6 to 4. One of the contestants from the previous episode didn’t continue so there were only 5 to start this round. This time all started with a bowl of rice, oil, salt and pepper. To those ingredients they could add 8 of 16 other items that were on a table behind them. They were required to use some of each of the 8 items they selected – not necessarily all of each item they chose. They had 20 minutes to prepare their dishes. After the judges made their decisions there were 2 of the 5 that were to be dropped from the next round. The audience was allowed to vote for 1 chef to stay of the 2 the judges were going to let go. So at the end of the round there were 4 chefs remaining in the competition. Jan and Kelsey voted for Tim to stay but they were not in the majority so he was out. Next round will probably in a couple weeks as we sail around Australia.

I made a time lapse as we sailed in the Tasman Sea headed for Cook Strait (between North Island and South Island). While that was happening I noticed a couple things in the water at a distance from us. The first was some type of platform – which turned out to be a natural gas platform for the Maui gas field. The second was an offshore wind farm with many windmills. I included some screenshots for these so you can read further if you wish. Both the gas platform and the windmills were at least 12-15 miles from the ship so they appear small in the photos.

Dinner was next and included are photos of some of what we had this evening. Sharon – I’m sure you would like to try Kelsey’s choice – the one with the strange looking seafood on top of the risotto. Kelsey gave the seafood to Karen at our table because she couldn’t stand to look at it.

The show for the evening was performed by the production staff and titled “Good And Evil”. As usual the show was entertaining with good singing, dancing and this time the techno guys to contort their bodies.

Tomorrow is our visit to the first of two cities we will see in South Island – Christchurch.

Here is a link to today’s video and photos.