Thursday afternoon. We’re steaming right along. We’ve been a little over 1000 nms thus far. We’re about 125 nms southeast of the tip of Newfoundland. We’ve have entered the area known as The Grand Banks. It’s only 300 feet deep, relatively shallow. It’s where the cold air and water of the artic currents meet the warm air and currents flowing up from the Gulfstream. This produces great fishing grounds and ……fog! We move in and out of fog banks continually sounding the horn. I hope the radar on the bridge is working! Once we clear these banks, we’ll truly enter the North Atlantic.
I have been amazed at the calm sea – it has been 2-4 feet since we left, and we haven’t seen so much as a white cap. There have been some whale sightings. We’ve maintained a heading of about 60 degrees and thus are slowly moving northward, so the temperature is dropping. We just passed the 46th parallel, so we’ve moved about 6 degrees north from New York. It’s pretty chilly on deck.
But, I feel guilty at times when I compare our voyage to the passages of my ancestors. My paternal grandmother, Violet Henderson escaped the poverty and over-crowding of London by passaging from England to the new world of Canada in 1905. She was 10 years old and traveled with her single mother, Emma who was 45 years of age at the time. They spent 11 days at sea in November aboard SS Kensington. Kensington was only 480 ft without “stabilizers”. Not a bad ship for her day, but comforts and technology on board were primitive by today’s standard of QMII.
Tonight, we go to a formal dinner in the swankiest dining room onboard, and then onto a broadway-type musical show in the ship’s theatre. It’s evening gowns and tux again. Doubt Violet and Emma enjoyed anything like that.
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