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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