16 nautical miles north of the Titanic

Friday, April 24, 2009 – sailed 16 nautical miles to the north of the final resting place of RMS Titanic just before noon
Rainy and dreary – just like a winter day with mild temperatures – beautiful rainbow came out at dinner!

Did you know there is a crater on Mars which is 350 miles WIDE and as long as the width of the continental USA? Did you know there is a mountain on Mars which is 16 miles high?

Up at 8 and ordered room service. Probably last time for that big luxury…and it came within 10 minutes! Maybe being in the Grills category helped with the quick delivery…Had tea and talk with friends in their suite and then to the Groovy Choir singing in the Grand Lobby. It was great fun! They hand out song sheets and the jazz trio plays the songs and you sing along!

Hurried up to the 12th Sports Deck for the Baggo Tournament, which is sliding bean bags onto an aluminum angled sheet. You need to throw the bean bag into the hole to get the most points, otherwise you get one point when it rests on the top.

Went to the Bridge Observation Deck, which is a glass panel behind the bridge. You can look in during the day and see them working but no flash photos can be taken. We also rode on the outside elevator with views of the sea and saw the card room.

Lunch in the Grills Restaurant, did laundry and then met with a friend to transfer some photos and movies onto my computer. Went to see the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) presentation of “Bottom’s Dream”. It was a nice adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and they condensed it to under an hour.

Then at 3:30, I attended the auction of the navigational chart of this voyage. It went for $400 (imagine how much someone spent on the world voyage chart as there were five segments!). Then we had a very informative virtual Bridge Tour. The 2nd and 3rd Officers presented a nice description of the bridge with photos and interesting facts. There are always two officers and two quartermasters on the bridge. He gave a comparison of the Royal Caribbean Freedom of the Seas ship vs. Cunard’s Queen Mary 2. The Freedom is the biggest cruise ship on the seas, at the moment. It is 158,000 gross tons (which is the total of the public space), has only lifeboats, 1001 horsepower, travels 22 knots and cost $590M to build.

The Queen Mary 2 is the world’s largest oceanliner at 148,528 gross tons. Its length, beam and draft are larger than the Freedom, they have 18 tenders (to transfer passengers to shore), 1154 horsepower, can cruise at 30 knots and it cost $800M to build. It has a long bow to cut through the waves, which is 1/2” thicker than other ships. He showed a photo of a Carnival cruise ship in a hurricane with the wave hitting the front of the ship all the way up to the bridge. The Queen Mary 2 has a long, high bow and the water would run off it and back into the sea.

It has one of the biggest bridges in the world. Their two pieces of radar equipment can track ships within a 12 mile and a 24 mile range. They also have a sharp-eye radar system. We try to keep a distance of two miles between us and other ships. They have an echo sounder to find the depth from the bottom of the ship to the bottom of the sea. There are four pods, which are like outboard motors on speedboats. The Azipods rotate 360 degrees and each weighs 250 tons. The propeller blade is 18 feet in diameter! There are four diesel generators and a gas turbine (like a Lear jet). There is enough power on this ship to power the city of Southampton!! We are currently in a storm and the ship is rocking…they are using two stabilizers (out of a total of four) and they help to correct the roll and reduce it by 80% (thankfully).

We saw a TV interview of the Commodore and he mentioned the Queen Victoria had a helicopter evacuation a few hours before we had ours on Monday!!! They had a woman on dialysis who had boarded and then received a call at 2AM that the hospital had a kidney for her! So she was picked up and flown to Cambridge to receive the kidney…and then the same helicopter flew out to pick up our passenger to take him to Cornwall’s hospital! What a coincidence.

This ship makes 450,000 gallons of water a day to serve the ship. They do not have a need to take on much additional water in the ports of call. We travel over 3100 nautical miles to NY.

We read some of the interesting historical articles on the walls and picked up the audio headsets to enhance the experience. Dressed for our very last formal evening on this incredible voyage! Dinner with another couple and we had flambéed cherries jubilee and Baked Alaska (although we did not order both!). Had our last cocktail party with the Commodore and Sr. Officers and had a nice time in the Queens Room. We were late to the production show “Passionata”, a dance production number, so we watched most of it and then went to the second show also! We went to the casino for awhile and took some photos around the ship. We never made it to the Ascot Ball, as the Queens Room is in the back of the ship, which is very inconvenient when you realize how long it is from the theater to the Queens Room!

Lectures: “The Search for Life Beyond Earth”, Cooking demonstration on tiramisu and swordfish.

I found the words to the song I was thinking of for these final days of the trip…
“Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
Slipping through my fingers...”