Two sea days after Salalah

Wednesday April 15 2009 - First day in the area subject to pirate attack and we were disappointed, this morning that we didn‘t see another single ship. By 10.00am the captain announced that we were now in the corridor protected by an international task force and around 02.00pm we saw a destroyer, don’t know which country, as it was too far away. There was a flurry of activity, mostly by passengers with cameras and binoculars, when a couple of small boats appeared ahead of us, was this finally the pirates, they turned out to be only fishing boats, but they could have been pirates disguised as fishing boats. At 03.00pm we went to a free wine tasting seminar, where we learned all there is to know about fine wines, 2 white, 2 red and an ice wine sample, trouble was there was a long discussion between each sample. We went out on the promenade deck after dinner tonight and our lunch time waiter had been drafted as a security person patrolling the deck with his eyes focussed out to sea, we felt so much safer.



Our location on the stateroon tv



Thursday April 16 2009 - No pirates in sight, in fact no ships of any kind in sight, we’re 1000 miles away from our next stop, Safaga, in Egypt. Currently, 09.00am, the coast of Somalia is about 50 miles South of us while the coast of Yemen and the town of Aden is about 30 miles North, if all goes to schedule, we should pass through into the Red Sea by the end of today.

Canadian Navy to the rescue



Around 11.30am the captain announced there were several navy vessels ahead of us, too far for anyone to identify, then within 5 minutes from behind the ship, we could see a helicopter approaching, a Canadian Sea King flew by, I was on the top deck and could clearly see a crewman standing in the open doorway waving as the big copter flew the length of the ship before peeling off to the port side. We never saw any of the ships ahead of us, presumably they moved off to other locations. We went Sabatinis, the special restaurant, for an English pub lunch of fish and chips with mushy peas, the food was good enough but the portions were small so we headed straight to the Panorama buffet after, for desert.

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