We were up early and knew immediately that it was too rough to get into the port of Nawiliwili. We had heard the pool sloshing all night long, and needed to hold on just to walk around our mid ship cabin. G left to get coffee and see what it looked like outside but I was still in the cabin at 7:35am when an announcement was made, “Man overboard, port side”. In all our days of cruising, I’ve never heard that one before, without including the word DRILL along with it. But just a few minutes later, Captain McBain announced that, after multiple attempts to board the harbor pilot, he had fallen into the water (an extremely dangerous situation; in fact, a harbor pilot was killed here in Kauai attempting to disembark the Island Princess almost exactly 20 years ago) but also that he had already been retrieved by the pilot boat and was uninjured. Huge relief.
There is still some confusion in my mind about why the pilot was trying to board in the first place since we knew we weren’t going to be porting in Nawiliwili today, but Captain McBain said something about him being our pilot for tomorrow in Kahului, Maui also and they were trying to board him early. I don’t know…these things are way above my pay grade.
I grabbed my walking stick to meet up with G in the very back of the World Fresh Marketplace. There are some comfy chairs back there against the glass that kind of encircle you when you’re sitting in them, and they felt safest this morning. They were also very comfortable, a good thing since we spent all morning sitting in them. CD Nathan made an announcement telling us a new Patter would be distributed, and in the meantime I could see new events popping up on Journey on my phone, but nothing was calling to me until after lunch, which was good, because getting around remained tough.
Eventually, we decided that the most productive thing we could do was start to make progress on our minibar. The items, especially the small bottles of alcohol, have been growing in number since we first boarded. I don’t generally drink, and G doesn’t drink a lot, but there wasn’t much rlse we wanted
to do this morning. He returned to the cabin to get some bottles of gin and we bought some cans of tonic water with limes from the Outrigger Bar and got to it. By 10:30am, things were feeling quite good.
Note: the following paragraph is for all this readers who advise me to just tell stories if I run out of cruise things to talk about, so look away now if you’re just here to read about cruise activities and ports.
Our conversation wandered, as it tends to do when we start drinking before noon, and we were eventually discussing old station wagons and their value today, which prompted me to text my brothers. I knew Dad bought a new 1967 Ford Fairlane in candy apple red because my older brother (5 years my senior) and I got to choose the color. I also knew there was a station wagon before that one (part of our family lore involves me sitting in the back, taking off my dress and tossing it out the back window, requiring Dad to back up while hauling a pop up trailer to retrieve it), but I remembered nothing else about it. Of course my brothers were well familiar with the deets, even the younger one (7 years younger than me) and they knew that it was a ‘64 Ford Fairlane with an 289 cubic inch V8 engine with a 3-on-the-tree transmission and nonsynchronized first gear and that there was a ‘58 Ford station wagon before that one. If you are a girl who didn’t have brothers, I’m sorry you’ve missed out on these sorts of conversations but they go a long way in explaining why I’ve always been a tomboy. Also, I can’t help but think that if Dad hadn’t needed those station wagons to do things like, oh, go to work and take us on camping, and had just bought and garaged all of them, I’d be able to cruise full time right now.
G had mentioned that it was much more stable in our mid ship cabin, but I didn’t want to stay inside there and have to lay on the bed all morning, and the ship felt packed with people, with the weather forcing everyone inside, so we just stayed where we were, in our comfy chairs with views in all directions, grazing in the buffet when we got hungry.
This was our SIXTH sea day in a row, but, really, if you don’t count turnaround day, it was my seventh in a row. If we’re getting tired of it, I’m can only imagine how sick the crew is of all of us. It’s like a mom with young kids…they’re always underfoot, they’re always demanding something (I need LIMES for my G&T) and the house is a mess. They sure are a patient bunch.
It started to clear up and dry out a little after noon, and, though the seas remained rough, it gave me hope for a better weather day tomorrow on Maui. This cruise has also given us a lot to think about with regard to what we want to be doing next year at this time. I think perhaps that our stellar weather last cruise may have given us a more optimistic perception about what we might expect on a Hawaii cruise in January and February, and that this cruise is painting a more realistic picture. On the other hand, this storm hitting Hawaii is newsworthy in its intensity.
The afternoon offered several events I was interested in. I started with ukulele class at 1pm in Club Fusion. Brian gave us songbooks he had printed and we basically just played songs together for the whole class. It was so much fun to see how much progress we’ve made.
All this fun I’ve been having is on a inexpensive kids’ ukulele using handwritten chord sheets
These were just returned from the print shop and are an excellent compilation of beginner songs
I next went to the Explorers Lounge for Fred Cink’s lecture on the sun (fascinating), and afterwards had a few-minute rest in the cabin to recharge me and y iPhones before dressing for the evening. We both went to Club Fusion for naturalist Daniel Gohstand’s talk on the history of early Polynesian canoes and the development of the surf board and then the cultural importance of Hawaiian drumming.
Huge shout out to CD Nathan and the activities team for pulling all this together in very short notice today (though they probably also had an idea that Kauai would be cancelled).
Captain McBain offered another update on the harbor pilot while we were at dinner, assuring us that he was doing well. He also gave us the weather forecast for tomorrow in Kahului, Maui, which has had lots of flooding and power outages in the past few days. Oh my. We are among the fortunate very few on board who have been to all these islands many times before, but most people have not, and, even if we can get into port tomorrow, the weather looks fairly abysmal.
The ménage à trois
Because some days just demand dessert
As soon as we missed our port today, I wondered about our Princess Theater entertainment for this evening. We were supposed to get a four person vocal ensemble on board today, and that obviously didn’t happen. Luckily, CD Nathan still had Erik Bryan, the Magic Maker in Magic to Do on board, and he performed his Let Me Be Frank show again tonight. I’ve probably seen this show enough already this season, but it is a good one, and was something to do tonight while we were waiting for the 70s Disco party in Club Fusion.
Here’s hoping we get into Kahului port tomorrow and don’t have an all day rain!
The original Patter
The revised Patter cover
The revised activities schedule
