Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Sailing Sailing Over the Ocean Blue

Well after sixteen days at sea let me tell you I am ready for some dry land!  I thought I should update a few sailing photos so you can see what we've been up to as we departed Togo and headed down to South Africa... 

Here are the final preparations prior to departure - putting up the gangway

Estellie and I as we are leaving the port for the final time

Those staying on land with off ship programs waved us off..can you find me on the top deck?

...and the view from the dock of the ship leaving the port backward

Goodbye Togo!

We've had quite a few sailing activities to keep us busy given our extended time at sea. This has included plenty of movie nights, sock golf, a carnival, and a "Sailing Olympics." The sponsor for the sailing olympics was HobNob biscuits, which is slightly ironic given that these cookies only come out during sail time to ward off sea sickness.  I was on the olympic team "North and South," named appropriately as we are two North Americans and two South Africans. Please note that Matt is not smiling as he said he had his "game face" on.  We are holding toothbrushes in this photo as we were instructed to bring them with us for the Olympic events.  Here we are ready to start the games!


We played many interesting games such as "count as many hobnob cookie boxes as you can while walking around inside a hula hoop"and see how big you can make a HobNob tower!  Unfortunately though, we did not win the sailing olympics.  Had we won, we would have received one of these lovely hobnob cookie box trophies!  Oh well :)


In other fun news we had a few days of quite rocky sailing.  We made it to a Force 8 (Force 12 is hurricane weather according to the Beaufort Scale) and here is a nice photo of the bow on our very stable rail ferry of a ship.  The bow was closed for quite a few days during this rocky time, as the waves were at times over 20 feet high! 

 

Well that's my sailing update from somewhere off the coast of South Africa.  Next stop: Durban, South Africa - the third busiest container port in the Southern Hemisphere. 


Later this week I'll depart the ship for good as I finish off this year long adventure.  I'll travel throughout South Africa before returning stateside, and then do a little traveling in the midwest as well.   So I might be MIA from the blog for a while...but perhaps there are a few final blog thoughts to come!

No comments:

Post a Comment