Sea Day 9

Well, there is now no longer one ocean I love above all others. I no longer love the Indian Ocean. It has turned on us. It is not now the warm and placid body of water we loved more than any other. The captain warned in his noon announcement that conditions will continue to worsen. He said we are sailing SSE into a stiff wind and heavy swells. He said by evening he expected the swells to be huge, in the range of 18 to 20 feet, I believe. The sun is shining and there are few clouds so I don't know what is causing these conditions now. Unfortunately, we have our 2nd dinner reservation aft on deck 10 tonight at Tuscan Steak House. I have no idea how I'll get up there later. The bad news is that the Australian Bight, the Bass Strait and the Tasman Sea are what is left to sail for our remaining 5 sea days and all are infamous for rough conditions. It doesn't look good.

I think yesterday that I said our next port is Esperance. That is wrong. It is Fremantle tomorrow. The captain said at noon that due to conditions, he expects to arrive at least 1 and a half hours late. We were originally scheduled in at 10am. Now,
we'll arrive closer to noon. Bad news for some. Good news is that we've been here before and had only planned to wander and visit the Maritime Museum near the cruise port that we missed last time. At least at some point tomorrow, we'll be able to just walk off and be on solid land!

We did make it up to Terrace for breakfast because GDR wasn't serving until 10am. They had a Grand Brunch Buffet from 10am to 1pm. We never had anything like that on Marina in over 50 days. I suppose it is a new thing, or an R ship vs O ship thing, or maybe there was never a Sunday sea day in 2015. I don't know. But, it meant if we wanted breakfast, we had to go up. We went down to GDR after noon for lunch at the brunch. It was not pleasant. We encountered some resistance about our request for a table for 2. We were seated in what appeared to be a service hole, but it was just that the captain was hosting 2 couples in that area and evidently the server only expected to have that table. They had a special menu and 3 of them ordered off it and 2 ate from the buffet. The other 4 people who wound up in that area were pretty solidly ignored. It was our first time with really bad service onboard Sirena to date. It was the kind of thing that consistently kept us out of Marina's GDR in 2015 though.

There is no popcorn movie today. There is nothing on TV that we haven't seen except the 3 films that aren't in English and we're skipping those. So, it has been a napping day. That is good. Also, when I double up seasick meds, it seems all I can do is sleep.

So far the doubling of swell the captain predicted has not happened. Good news. We enjoyed our 2nd meal in Tuscan Steak House. It was much better than our first. I assume this is related to the staff turnover that happened in Bali. So more good news. In other news, Currents delivered tonight has moved our arrival in Fremantle back to noon now. We'll see when we get there. They say they'll have a complimentary shuttle to South Terrace between Suffolk and Norfolk. It should run every half hour to 45 minutes.

No photos today.