Thursday, February 27, 2020

February 27th and 28th - Great Barrier Reef


For the last couple of days, we’ve been gliding through the Torres Strait at the very top of Australia touching on the northern most part of the Great Barrier Reef.  These nav charts show our position.



We are mostly in very shallow water, about 4 meters or 13 feet.  That’s not much for a huge ship like this.  We have a pilot on board, an expert navigator for this area who is helping the bridge staff and also providing commentary for our sometimes very slow journey through the area.  This is a picture of the pilot boat and a customs plane buzzing overhead.  As you can see from the nav pictures above, we are very close to Papua New Guinea.  They have a problem with smugglers and with refugees coming to Australia by boat and small plane.  We’ve seen a number of official boats and planes on this stretch as they patrol the area.


The scenery is stunning and the photos really don’t do justice to the changing color of the water.  At times it’s a stunning aqua blue but on film it just looks flat.  The various outcroppings and islands will have to suffice for today.  We are getting very close to some of them as you can see.





The Torres Strait takes us from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and into the Coral Sea.  The Coral Sea is the home of the Great Barrier Reef and also to many famous WWII battles.  Surprisingly they are not having speakers on that latter subject but happily we have had some good talks on the Reef itself and the many challenges facing it as the water temperature rises and pollution encroaches.

Today, Friday, marks the one-half point of this trip, so I guess you could say we’re on our way home now, sort of.  We are 15 hours ahead of the east coast of the US and will lose a few more hours before we start moving the clock back after Melbourne.

We heard that the Crystal Serenity, a high-end cruise ship on its own world cruise had made changes to their itinerary because of the virus.  They are currently in New Zealand and are heading for Sydney Australia.  They began their trip in LA and had the Asian part of their voyage ahead of them.  Of course, they cancelled all those ports, no surprise there.  What is surprising is they are not allowing any new passengers on in Sydney (as of the time of this writing we still are).  Instead they are telling their current passengers that they can get off in Sydney, or at the end of the voyage in Rome…and that’s it.  There will be no other disembarkation allowed.  

They will circumnavigate Australia in the opposite direction from where we just came and then go 8 straight sea days to Mumbai, India before finishing the rest of their trip through the middle east and Europe.

In other news one of our final stops, Tenerife in the Canary Islands is having virus problems but we won’t be there until mid-April so too early to predict what will happen.  A Regent ship, also on its world voyage was denied docking in Samoa and American Samoa this past week.  There are no sick people on the ship, they were just denied entry.  The ship was able to continue onto Fiji their next port. 

We talked to an Australian couple today who had a friend on the Diamond Princess, the ship held in quarantine by the Japanese.  They told us that people were confined to their rooms, maybe let out for a couple of hours every other day but that’s it.  Their food was left for them in the hall and the staff didn’t come into to clean the room.  What a nightmare for those vacationers.  Their friend was ill with a possible stress related (who can blame them) ailment but is okay now and will soon be back in Australia.

For us, we still have smooth sailing for now.  We’re in Yorkey’s Knob, the port for Cairns (pronounced Cans) tomorrow.  It will be great to be off the ship!

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