Russ and Jan's World Cruise: On our way to Hawaii

January 14, 2023 – On our way to Hawaii

I’ve been quiet for several days as there isn’t usually a whole lot to talk about on our sea days. This is actually a GOOD thing. We can be as busy as we want and sometimes, we have a very full day. Or we can be pretty much as quiet as we want.

We get up around 5:00 a.m. +/- Have some coffee, do our stretches, try to go for a walk, then head up to breakfast. Between LA and Hawaii, the seas were running in the “rough” category, so we discovered we can get ¼ mile in just by walking in our corridor where there is a handy railing we can hold onto if necessary. A complete lap shows as ¼ mile on my Fitbit. So, we vary the distance by the number of laps we take.

As a bit of a sidebar: Factoids shared with us. Covering almost 64 million square miles, the Pacific is an ocean of extremes. At twice the size of the Atlantic, its waters comprise around one-third of the planet’s surface and 46 percent of the world’s total water surface. That’s a larger area than all the land regions of the world combined. Its longest measurement from east to west is 12,300 miles, a distance equal to half the world’s circumference. Amid this vast expanse of blue, some 25,000 islands rise up from below the surface, more than half of the total number of islands on the planet. The deepest point in the world plunges far below the Pacific’s surface: the famed Mariana Trench some 35,797 feet deep.

Since entering the Pacific in Panama, the ocean depth has often been 15,000 feet or more!

We are attempting to learn the game of bridge. Our lessons are every sea day at 10:00 a.m. Often it is followed by a lecture that we would like to listen to. Then it is time for lunch. Usually a little quiet time, but around 4:30, the lectures start again. When we are done with that, it is time to consider a libation, followed by dinner. Such a tough life.

After LA on the 8^th of January, we were supposed to go to Santa Barbara. We received notice that, due to weather, we would not be going there. So out of LA we headed directly for Hawaii, except our captain decided to swing quite aways south to try to avoid the storm that was pounding into the West Coast. Other than substantial swells on the ocean, we had no rain. And reports of the conditions in Santa Barbara on the day we were supposed to be there made us glad we weren’t there.

The rocking of the ship from the swells can really vary. Sometimes it is side-to-side. Sometimes it is more of up a hill followed by down a hill. One of the most challenging things is trying to take a shower in a box that is tilting one way or another.

As we approached the Hawaiian Islands, the Captain was able to come in fairly close to the Big Island and sail around the south coast at a very pleasant pace. It was great to see land again after 6 days. The water was an amazing dark sapphire blue. As there is an active volcano on the Big Island right now, the skies were quite hazy and cloudy.