Monday, November 28, 2011
This was a whole day at sea. The day dawned gloomy and gray. There was a steady strong breeze and the sea was rough. Karen had put on her seasick patch on Sunday. I wanted to hold off and see if I could get by without one. Sometimes they could have some unpleasant side effects. I did pretty well as the day went on but by suppertime I was starting to feel a little dizzy. I was not nauseated but it felt like it could head off in that direction any minute. I had Karen put one of the patches on me. Since we had a couple extras, we gave one to Linda too.
Celest’s jaw had been hurting her right along. She was NOT having a happy time. She missed a lot of the things we were doing and stayed in her cabin much of the time. When she did join us for a meal, she just got the soup or something soft to eat. Spicy or acidic things hurt her just as much. Karen: Sometimes she could force a drink down which was a mercy.
We had breakfast in the dining room. I had the full English breakfast with bangers and fried tomato. Lunch was on the Lido deck. But the big deal that day was dinner in the Pinnicle Grill. This is the ship’s fanciest restaurant and you have to pay extra to eat here. This was Sue’s treat. The quality of the food in the Rotterdam dining room is so good, the food in the Pinnicle isn’t much better by comparison, but they take that extra little step in preparation. They do things like toss your Caesar Salad at table side or flambe your Steak Diane in front of you. We joked around with the waitress. Because I was the only guy with three women, she called me Charlie with my three angels. We said Karen must be Farrah, Linda was Jaclyn and Sue was Kate. Karen: the resemblance was, of course, obvious for each.
Some of our group wanted to gamble in the casino. Not me. I watched them a little but lost interest quickly. When it was time for the stage show we were heading for the theater when Sue pointed out the activities director to me. He had introduced himself at the previous evening’s entertainment which I did not attend. The others continued on to the show while I talked to him for a couple of minutes.
I wanted to meet him because I wanted to plant a letterbox on the ship. This could be a dicey thing but when I explained what I wanted to do, he invited me to drop by his office the next day and show him what I had. Before we left on the cruise I had carved a rubber stamp for the Ryndam and prepared a journal. The only problem was the box I had to store it in. All that was available to me was one of the camoflaged ones that I usually hide in the woods. You can imagine how that would look if someone found it under a gangway or something. Bomb squad front and center. I would have to think about that a little.
I had no interest in seeing the stageshow but the others did. After that, Karen and Linda went up to the Crow’s Nest bar and listened to oldies over one last glass of wine. Karen: we chatted with a woman who had been on many cruises. She noticed we were using the seasick patch. She asked us if they gave us a dry mouth. That was an understatement. All of us were so dry we could barely swallow. It could have been a ploy to make people buy more drinks in the bar but the things were working. Only about a third of the passengers made it to the evening meal because of the rough seas, but all of us were fine.
I think my bottle of bourbon arrived that evening so I went back to the room and read for a little while over a relaxing bourbon and ginger ale.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The ship docked in Cozumel in the wee hours of the morning so we were all tied off and ready for the day by the time we woke up. We had an early breakfast at 7:00.
Exploring Cozumel by Jeep and Snorkel was our first excursion. Our guide was Eduardo, a very likeable and informed fellow. There were 16 in the group, all told. That meant 4 jeeps, 4 to a jeep. I drove one with Karen, Sue, and Linda along for the ride. Because the sea was so rough the day before, most of the water activities in Cozumel were cancelled. Eduardo was aware of this and had scouted out locations on the east side of the island where the water was generally calmer. He found a beach where we could do our snorkeling.
The snorkeling turned out to be an interesting matter. First off, almost half our group had no intention of snorkeling whatsoever. They were content to sit on the beach and watch the world go by. The rest of us got ready and went to check out our equipment. Sue, Karen, Linda, and I had bought masks and snorkels before the trip because you never know what kind of contamination the ones provided by the tour might have. But we figured the fins would be fine. We got some but mine were too small. They said ok, try these. But every pair was too small. We had to wait till an earlier dive group returned to get men’s fins that were big enough. All this time Eduardo is putting the hustle on us so it created a little tension.
Since I first started diving, my vision has deteriorated quite a bit. There is nothing I can clearly focus on in my entire range of vision. I have to have bifocals to see anything. This was going to be a problem since you can’t wear glasses and a diving mask at the same time. I don’t have contacts either. When I was trying to solve this problem before the trip, I came across an old pair of glasses that still had a fairly current prescription. I removed the bows and tried securing them to the front of the mask. I worked like a charm, but my friends told me I looked like a dork. Better to see and be kidded for being a dork than to not see at all.
Getting into the water turned out to be another challenge. The beach had a gradual slope out into the water and there was nowhere to sit to put your fins on other than the bottom. Karen was helping Sue get hers on but was not paying a lot of attention. When she met some resistance, she just started jamming the fins on, only to find that Sue had 3 toes in and 2 toes outside. With that corrected, Sue was set up. Next she helped me and other than it being like helping a beached whale, it went more smoothely. Linda had headed out in the mean time but got salt water up her nose and decided to pass on the whole deal. Karen flat out decided to skip this adventure and sat on the beach and basked in the sun.
The beach had a long gradual slope out to open water. By the time you were 50 feet out, it was only about 18 inches deep. This is too shallow to either walk or swim so I pulled myself along alligator style till it was deep enough for me to start using my fins. I hurried over to where Eduardo was and he led us around. There were sea fans waving in the current and Eduardo explained that if they were purple they were looking for food, but if they were brown, they had gathered some food and were digesting it. The reef was brown and not very colorful. It had received some pretty bad damage last year when there was a severe hurricane in the area and it had not revived yet. There were all sorts of colorful little fish about a couple of inches long. There was not as much wildlife as I had hoped for, but what was there was nice.
When we got about as far out as we were going to get, I had the horrible realization that my wedding ring which I have worn for 42 years, had fallen off my finger somewhere along the way. I was just sick. I did not look forward to telling Karen about it at all. On top of that, the $10 disposable underwater camera that I bought for this dive had fallen out of my pocket too. As we returned to shore to get out, I came up the slope the same way as I went out. As I crawled along I was looking at the bottom and I saw a small, but interesting sea shell. Next to it was something unusual, a thin silvery circle. I reached down to see what it was and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t my wedding ring, 95% buried in the sand. I cannot believe only coincidence was at work here.
What I saw underwater and my wedding ring restored to its normal if untraditional place on my hand (a reconstruction)
The next part of the excursion was a visit to an “eco park.” This is a natural area that has been set aside as a wildlife sanctuary. It’s mostly a mangrove bay that forms a barrier between the ocean and the island. Eduardo’s first trick was to show us the crocodiles. He led us out on this boardwalk and did a couple of high whistles. He figured it would take a few minutes for them to get there and investigate what was going on. Only problem, they never showed. So back to the road where he showed us the ruin of a small Mayan temple. It was to the goddess Ix-Chel. The configuration of the windows, doors, and the tower on the top made it sound a warning when the wind blew a certain way. It served as a warning systems for storms. We also stopped at another beach where they had prepared a Mexican lunch for us. It was simple but tasty. Last stop was at a lighthouse; those in our group who wanted to could climb the 109 steps up to get a more panoramic view. I chose to go into the adjoining Mayan museum.
All this time I had been driving the four of us in one of their jeeps. You can hardly imagine worse roads. There were potholes a foot deep in places. I would swerve to miss them, but that only made me hit another one. At long last we finally hit one of the island’s main roads and it was a direct trip back to the parking lot. By 3:30pm we were back, filthy and tired but we had a pretty fun day.
After supper we started trying to figure out how the next day’s excursion was going to work. The more we thought about it the less we thought it was going to work out. Karen: the ship was scheduled to dock much later than usual – about 7:30- and leave much earlier -about 4:00. That kind of timing wouldn’t allow for our Laminai tour which we were really looking forward to. We had hoped to see jungle wildlife and Mayan ruins. With the help of the front desk people we managed to get in touch with the excursion company and cancel the one we wanted. We also put in for a different excursion but by then it was too late and we didn’t get that one either.