The news this morning was of our sister ship, the Viking Sky (the ship in which we travelled the Baltic & Scandinavia last year) had lost engine power off the coast of Norway.  You may well have seen this on the news as well.  For their safety (since it’s a dangerous place to drift) the passengers and crew were evacuated via 11 helicopters carrying 30 people each. 

We speak of the ships in terms of their passenger capacity (930) but there are approximately 1 crew member for every 2 passengers so we are talking about well over 1300 people.  There were, we were told, a few minor injuries but nothing serious; everyone was evacuated and put up in hotels; and they managed to dock the ship. 

However, passengers are being sent home and the next scheduled cruise cancelled.  As Heather spoke of the incident during the church service and asked us to pray for all passengers and crew, she pointed out that the crew were trained to handle such events.  The passengers are required by maritime law to attend a safety briefing at the beginning of the cruise (in our case, since it is 5 segments, that means 5 times,) but the crew have safety drills every week so that their responses will come naturally and automatically.

The Bight is supposed to be very scenic with ‘towering seaside cliffs and rock outcroppings lashed by roiling surf,’ but, of course, we can’t see land so that aspect is lost on us. 

Instead, we have possibly the worst seas we’ve had so far making getting around the ship really interesting…  After dinner an enterprising young waiter procured a wheelchair and wheeled Chris back to our stateroom; he was definitely having more balance issues than usual with the rocking and rolling.

The captain told us the weather causing the rough seas is 500 mile to our south.  As mentioned earlier, whitecaps and surface waves are caused by local weather, but the swells (long period waves) and deep movement are caused by happenings sometimes thousands of miles away.

And we gained another two hours of sleep over two days–useful because it’s tiring to navigate around the ship in these conditions.

I have read many books (27 so far) during our cruise–reading is our most frequent after-dinner activity. All have been fiction, mostly mysteries. However, I am now reading The library book by Susan Orlean (which Chris discovered and recommended to me), centered on the Los Angeles Public Library and its destruction by fire in 1986, but it also treats libraries as a much broader theme. She is a wonderful writer (one reviewer said the only non-fiction writer they knew of as good or better than her is John McPhee (I intend to read some of his books on the cruise as well)), and I am enjoying it greatly. –Cynthia

Fjords, Sounds, Bays and Bights; and nary a bite to eat. The Viking Sun has spent about 2 days crossing the Great Australian Bight, so-called because that stretch of the Indian Ocean off the southern Australian coast is much wider and less land-bound than a Bay.  Much, much less land-bound than a fjord and much less bound than a sound.  Not however as subtle an expanse as the New Jersey-New York Bight that extends from Cape May to Montauk Point at the eastern end of Long Island.

     With a map of Australia and appropriate imagination, one could consider the Great Australian Bight resembles a wide, shallow “bite” out of the southern coast of Australia, but Wikimedia assures us there is no etymological relationship between the homophones. —Chris