Tuesday, November 17th,
At Sea Cruising through Cook Straights and South along the Coast of New Zealand

Bob:

Our Captain avoided the storm in the southern part of the Tasman Sea by skipping the scenic cruising down in the fjords of the South Island (rats!) and taking a more northerly track to the Cook Straights that separate the South Island from the North Island of New Zealand. We started seeing land off the starboard bow about 11:00, and by 12:00 when we were eating lunch in the buffet, we saw land on both sides of the ship.

After lunch we passed the narrowest point of Cook Straights and Wellington was just a few kilometers away on the North Island at that point although I personally never saw a sign of it. Part of the problem was that my attention was focused on the spectacularly rugged, mountainous scenery of the South Island. Although it was rather cold and windy out on deck we grabbed our cameras and settled in on some deck chairs on deck 14 to watch the scenery pass by. The views were great as we had a brilliant sun streaming down from a clear blue sky studded with puffy clouds kind of in a line atop the mountains on the horizon plus a few contrails from jet airplanes and such.

Passing through the straight, the Sun Princess curled around to the South, not exactly hugging the coast of the South Island but steaming along quietly maybe 5 miles off shore. That gave us some spectacular panoramic views of the mountains of the South Island, but I found it frustratingly difficult to take good panoramic shots of it because the ship was moving and the sun was so bright that I couldn't clearly see anything other than patterns of clouds in the sky in the camera's video display. Unlike a previous Olympus I had, the panoramic mode on the E-Volt 510 can ONLY be used with the electronic video display, so in strong sunlight conditions it becomes very difficult to make sure that you have correctly overlapped each pair of images in the set. But when we stitched the picture sets together later that evening, the panoramic vistas did, fortunately, turn out OK.

But finally the wind got too cold for us and we retreated to the cabin for the afternoon where we swapped off using "Baby", our small laptop computer, for different tasks. I used Baby to update my journal and afterwards read Janet Evanovich's "Motor Mouth" when I took a break. Monika used Baby to back up all the pictures we had just taken and stitch together the panoramic shots from my digital SLR (her camera stitches panoramic segments while still in the camera), and then she took a break by reading Amanda Quick's "Second Sight".

After a nice restful (and very scenic!) afternoon we donned our "smart casual" clothes for dinner with our table mates. After dinner, it was very pleasant to watch the sun go down before going to the show. The evening show was a major production that had sections of singing tunes fro the 20s and 30s interleaved with dance routines based on dances from that period such as Charleston, Swing, etc. Lots of fun.