Day 6: Dolphins for coffee, whales for dinner

Finally a day to do - nothing.

Apart from wandering through the ship, 

The most difficult part of the day was sorting out my Internet connection. Which proved to be more painful than I could have ever have imagined.

We did our first round of the ship via the promenade deck, and tried to work out the layout of the ship. Every time we thought we had it worked out we'd find ourselves on the wrong deck/wrong side/wrong end of the ship.  

That was pretty much it. We sat down for coffee around 11am, ordered a latte and a cappuccino, and we're delighted to find that the quality had improved by an order of magnitude. 

Topping off the coffee experience was the appearance of several dolphins. We saw three of them jumping through the waves perhaps one hundred meters off the port bow. The buzz rippled through the coffee lounge, and soon there were a few of us gathered at the windows. 

One of the dolphins enhanced the moment by popping up just below our window, doing dolphin tricks. This is the kind of stuff that I love about cruising.

Then I slept. Watching dolphins is hard work.

At dinner, not wanting to be overshadowed by their smaller cousins, a pod of whales showed up off the port bow (always the port bow - go figure). There, we're a dozen possibly more, pacing the ship for 15-20 minutes or so.

As with the dolphins, one their members took centre stage and did a rather spectacular breech. I only caught the end of it, and it was still phenomenal to watch.

We ended the evening watching "Snow White and the Huntsman" on the big open-air screen on the top deck. Not a bad film, despite starring the "Twilight" chick, and would it have been better if it was bloody freezing. Kind of like watching an outdoor movie in Alaska, oddly enough.

It was good we had a quiet day. We had to be rested for our next adventure, which was so exciting it was almost more than we could - bear.