Day at Sea (On the way to Barbados)

Woke up this morning on our way out of the Amazon River, hopefully will be seeing that beautiful Blue ocean soon. The cruise notes said today was Saturday Mary’s in the La Veranda. They started at 7:30 AM so I figured I would head up to the Bloody Mary Bar and make myself a nice Bloody Mary and bring it back to the room. So this ship has a lot of great things but Bloody Mary’s is not one of them. They use Something like Mr and Mrs T’s mix which to me is a diluted down tomato juice. So I asked if I could make my own they said no and I asked if they had any horseradish to spice it up and they said no. I decided I didn’t need it and we just headed to the Compass Rose for breakfast. It’s a rainy day not doing the pool, the guest lecture was doing a talk about Teddy Roosevelt’s exploration of the Amazon. It was quite interesting as she had some footage from the trip that was restored, definitely a little more challenging of a trip than what we took.

So we came back up to the cabin to watch the World Cup match which started here at noon, Lisa decided to lay down for a quick nap instead. I was sitting at the Dining Room table and around 11:55 AM the ship came to an abrupt stop and didn’t budge an inch. It started leaning a bit on our side of the ship and then I saw the side thrusters on our side kick in and the ship started to straighten up but wasn’t moving an inch. Well the Captain always gives us an update every day at noon but today we didn’t hear a peep out of him. We headed down for lunch and while we were eating he finally came on and told us we were stuck and had made a soft landing into the shallow water outside the channel. He told us the pilot’s had given him the current channel location in order to get out of the Amazon river but it must have shifted. He just made another announcement at 2:45 saying it might be a couple more hours before we were free and could start back on our way. We are waiting on the tide to come in and the water to rise enough to free the ship from what we are calling a sand bar but it’s just the natural channel that is formed by the sediment from the Amazon.

Just in case we aren’t heard from again here is the location to start looking for us 😀

Well it’s 3:25 PM and we are starting to feel a little rocking so that may be a good sign, hopefully when we get free there isn’t any damage that needs to be fixed.

At 5:20 PM they lowered a boat to check out if there was any damage to the ship, hopefully there isn’t any damage and we are able to start back up. They are using the side thruster’s on our side of the ship hopefully they make progress.

It’s now 5:50PM and we are moving very slow and starting to speed up, the Captain just came on and let everybody know that everything seems to be OK. Since we were so far ahead of schedule due to the cancelled stop maybe we will make it to Barbados on time.

It’s now after dinner and all is well the ship seems to be sailing at the normal speed, ~18 knots so we believe all is well. So no need to worry, all is well on the Seven Seas Navigator.