Exmouth, Australia

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We arrived right on schedule. There is not much here. We had another rough night sailing, but it had calmed down a lot by morning and the sun is bright without a cloud in the sky. Exmouth was only founded as a town in the 1960's. A community was started during WWII for Allies to resupply submarines. For a while, it was a US Naval base. There is a small base of low frequency radio towers left and a Navy pier and a staff of about 60. Now the town exists by tourism. They pride themselves on a Range to Reef experience. Exmouth has a semi-arid climate being between the 2 Australian weather extremes. They are just south of the monsoon track and usually miss the big storms. It was dry and about 32C here today.

The starboard side is facing land and has the tender dock so we have things to see and activity to watch. I don't know if I said that we were docked on the starboard side in Broome too. When we returned to the ship in the afternoon, it was facing the opposite direction. I don't know if they repositioned for some reason, or the ship had just drifted around the anchor chain.

There is about a 30 minute tender ride through some swells between here and shore so it looks like a long bumpy ride before reaching the breakwater. So, we decided to just stay aboard until our tour. Oceania is running a shuttle the 2 miles or so to town. They say to allow 30 minutes each way. The visitor info woman onboard says it is about a 10 to 15 minute ride even allowing for stops, so who knows. Our tour tickets say to be shoreside on the pier at 12:55pm. In fine print, they tell us to allow 30 minutes to tender ashore so we don't miss the bus. This morning's tours went as usual procedure. They met in Sirena Lounge where they waited to be called, then they scrummed for a ticket exchange and waited to be called to a tender. The tender took them all ashore and they boarded their coaches/boats, etc. This afternoon it is on us to figure out when to go ashore to meet the bus. I had already decided that we had to be at the tender door at 12:20pm at the latest to minimize missing a half-hourly tender, but what are we paying O for they are abdicating responsibility. I went down and waited at Destination Services to confirm my plan. I waited a good 10 minutes while a man explained how badly DS is handling tours by setting up conflict among passengers who then have to spend the day together. She blamed it all on the passengers and mostly because of on long voyages people are determined to be angry. Um, right, OK. He gave her numerous examples on this cruise and how smoothly things are handled on other cruise lines, but she continued to deny that DS had any ownership of the problems and it was all due to the passengers and their personalities. Well, I have to agree with the guy. Oceania Destination Services sets up the situations that are causing conflicts and bad behavior. It is almost all on O, who know how people will behave if put in certain situations. All the passengers who take tours and those who don't take the ship's tours suffer for it. We will remember that the next time we find ourselves comparing itineraries between lines, because frankly, who needs the hassles. Larger vessels than O do a much better job at handling tours and moving groups of people around smoothly and without bunching them up and leaving them to fight it out.

So, we had a big late breakfast at Terrace. We went up to Horizons and Clay used his tablet and I needlepointed while we waited to earn some Big O points. We both putted and threw bean bags. We earned 4 points, with my 6 from the other day we have 10. I still don't know what is the minimum required to redeem an O logo prize. The suspense builds.

We had lunch in Waves so we'd be off in time. Our tour lasts 3 hours so it was straight back onboard to sail at 5pm for us. We were at the tender door at 12:10pm. The tender was loaded and departed at 12:25pm. The trip lasted about 15 minutes, then we waited inside the breakwater for another 10 minutes before the previous tender left. It was a long walk on a small craft pier to get to land. We arrived at the tour waiting area about an hour after we had started! They had 2 buses full. We got on the 2nd bus. It was a good tour given what there is here. At $69USD, it was also an excellent value compared to the $169 USD for tours in Papua New Guinea which were no comparison at all. We saw some wildlife! A wallaby hopped across the road in front of us and just kept going. Several emus were seen alongside the road. One of their tourist attractions is Australia's only roadside signs warning of emus with chicks. We actually saw one father with 2 teenaged chicks.

The swells seemed calmer on the tender ride back to Sirena, so fingers crossed that the Indian Ocean has finally calmed down.

Western Australia is much more sparsely populated than the East Coast so we are glad to finally get to visit this part at least a little. The part around Perth in the South is densely populated again and we had already been there, so this part has been new to us. Our next port Esperance is new to us too. It is also a tender port. We probably should have booked a tour here, but left it until too late and everything we were interested in doing was booked up. I even looked for independent tour operators but O had everybody booked up. We'll hope the locals do as good a job putting on something for independents as they seemed to in Broome and Exmouth. We'll see. Stay tuned. Tomorrow is another sea day.

There is nothing on the GDR menu that interests so we're really hoping for some calm sailing so we can eat upstairs at Terrace tonight. I'll go ahead and post this now and Clay should be uploading photos after dinner. So, if the links aren't live yet, check back later.

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