12. At sea

Overnight we have continued our journey southwards although the Captain has tracked so as to skirt around the worst of the tropical storm. Having said that, the skies are very grey as we traverse the outer bands, there is a large swell running, the promenade deck has been closed due to high winds and the swimming pools have been emptied. The Captain has been on the pa advising that Naha, the capital of Okinawa prefecture is being battered by the storm but that we are still anticipating an early arrival into our next port, Ishigawa. Fingers crossed!

In the meantime we have kept ourselves entertained with the inevitable trivia and have a new team of four Aussies, a couple from Adelaide (Warren and Barb) and a couple from Cairns (Craig and Jen) but we have yet to win. We took part in a game show where Japanese and non-Japanese were teamed together and we had to write and speak in each other's language....it was a lot of fun and a good way to break down barriers. Luckily, one of the ladies on our team spoke a bit of English otherwise I fear we would have gained no points at all.

Although the sea calmed somewhat over the course of the day, the restaurant was still only half full for dinner and we heard several stories of passengers not moving from their staterooms for the entire day.

Sunday dawned with partly cloudy skies, an even flatter sea with a few white horses and an air temperature of 28C. The day got off to an even better start when our team won the morning trivia session, so we now have metal water bottles to go with the notebooks that we won on the first week. It's not really compensation for missing Okinawa which is where we were due to be docked on Sunday but we cannot control the weather. Still, the latest weather charts appear to show the storm moving out of the area and off into China. 

With the afternoon trivia session also won, we only had the evening music round to complete the hat-trick. Unfortunately we could only manage the runners up spot.

Never mind...after dinner we spent the remainder of the evening putting the world to rights over drinks with our new dining companions, Ian and Carole, from Scotland.