Sunday 30th March

Day at sea and woke to fog so thick we could barely see the rail on the balcony, it was so thick we had a guy on the bow with his hand out so he could shout a warning if we got too close to anything, we were creeping along literally feeling our way. Carol said the fog horn had been going all night but I didn’t hear a thing and anyway it’s there to tell everyone else to get out of the way. Thank goodness for Radar I say, anything that’s too small to show up on radar won’t be missed if we run them down, but they needn’t have worried as the fog soon cleared when the sun got up.

We sailed down the South China Sea off the coast of mainland China watching the hundreds of fishing vessels compete for the various species of fish available in these waters. The heavier vessels (ourselves included) were constantly having to change course to avoid the nets set by them, the only indication we had that they were there were tiny buoys with little pennants on the top of a foot high stick. Then we had to negotiate the Oyster farms, huge areas were set aside for these as this area is a major producer of cultured pearls. Further south we entered the Straight of Tonkin between the island of Hainan and Guangdong before entering the Gulf of Tonkin proper. We then turned due West and headed for Haiphong in Halong Bay with a sea state of rippled flat calm and a temperature in the high twenties.

The Captains announcement bought a bit of a bombshell as he told us that due to the deteriorating situation and advice from the Foreign Office our visits to Sharm el Sheikh and Somhna in Egypt have been cancelled and we will instead be visiting Haifa in Israel for two days. Bummer, I’d have preferred a visit to Malta and a visit to Gibraltar in place of them, still better than nothing. Talks were not much to write home about (or blog about) first one ‘The Music of Rodgers and Hammerstein’, I swerved that one, and How Hitchcock designed his films, I went to that one but it was very disappointing, lots of padding around one or two interesting facts. Won’t bother with the next one Hitchcock and his Blondes. The nights Entertainer was good, Allan Stewart, singer, comedian and impressionist. Definitely going to watch him again. That’s it for now! Halong Bay Vietnam tomorrow. Oh nearly forgot, Clocks go back an hour tonight. That puts us six hours ahead of you, as your clocks went forward this weekend.