At Sea

It’s a cloudy, windy day in the Caribbean Sea as we sail toward the Panama Canal.  The picture  is the Miami skyline as we sailed by just after sunset. It’s hard to imagine that a week ago southern Florida was being severely impacted by Hurricane Sandy.

Hurricane Sandy did not cause our flight to Ft. Lauderdale to be canceled. It did, however, impact 35 of our shipmates, who were on the previous sailing of our ship, which came though Sandy on its way from Boston to Ft. Lauderdale. Instead of going to Martha’s Vineyard and Charleston as they were supposed to, they headed far out to sea—taking the long way around. Given the size of Sandy, however, they were unable to escape its fury, encountering 25+-foot seas for the better part of 2 days.  It sounds like almost everyone was seasick and many people suffered falling out of bed. We are much more fortunate.

Interesting day at sea. One lecturer this morning discussed the Caribbean Sea and Christopher Columbus, who sounds like a bit of a bungler. He died, not realizing that he had discovered a new world.  He thought he had gone to the Fareast and just missed the rich part! Fortunately, others pursued the adventure following him, but it was almost 100 year later that the richness of the New World was appreciated.

We also have an astronomer on board, who talked about comets and asteroids and presented some amazing photographs. Many of the photographs are from NASA, which provides an astronomy picture of the day at apod.nasa.gov. Unfortunately, the lecture supported the theory that girls don’t enjoy science and math like boys. The Columbus lecture had more girls than boys, while the astronomy lecture had twice as many boys as girls. Sad…. This girl had a great time!

More when we get to Panama.