Thursday 20th February
Who stole Wednesday that’s what I want to know? One minute we are going to bed on Tuesday evening and the next we are getting up on Thursday morning. Somebody just stole Wednesday! I didn’t have that much to drink that I slept right through. And another thing, when we went to bed we were eleven hours behind the UK and now we are thirteen hours ahead of you. When did that happen? Confused? You bet! Someone did steal Wednesday though. We never had it at all, no breakfast, lunch or dinner. Gone, just like that, gone! It’s not as if we have any Liverpudlians on board who we can blame. And it’s no good complaining, it’s not like they can give you another one, a spare that they just happen to have hanging around in a drawer or something. Puts you all out of sorts something like that, they’ll nick anything these days. Anyway what’s one day out of 120? Just as long as they don’t go making a habit of it and doesn’t happen again, I’ll say no more.
It’s continuing to get hotter. Stepping out on to the pool deck today was like stepping into a pizza oven, I’m surprised the pool hasn’t evaporated. Everywhere you look there are people basting themselves in variously flavoured oils and rotating slowly, roasting themselves evenly on this giant barbeque that doubles as a ship. Makes me look rather nervously at the menu come dinner time. Even the sea is too hot to wave it’s just lying there exhausted, flat, languid, hardly got the energy for a ripple.
We went to a talk by Dr Ingrid Visser who posed the question, who would win if a shark and a killer whale met? The answer is, the killer whale (or Orca to give it its proper name). Apparently they eat sharks for breakfast and any other meal come to that. She has only just provided evidence in the form of film to show how they do it. They swim past the shark avoiding the dangerous end and just as the shark is relaxing, thinking it’s safe the Orca karate chops the shark with it’s tail and then starts to munch it while it’s dazed. Some of the video footage was brilliant. She showed some shots of one shark (related to the Great White) that was so scared it tried to hide behind her in the water. The Orca was having none of it and ferreted it out and decked it, whereupon the shark then tried to get into her boat to escape. We were also told that there is no known incidents of a Killer whale attacking a human, except in captivity. Oh and we are going to get a preview of the film she’s made for the BBC (amongst others) before it’s shown on the networks.