Sailing Away (4/18-20)

First 3 sea days have flown by. The weather has been decent, not too cold, not too windy. We’ve managed some sun time on our balcony and lots of rambling around on outside decks. Everyone says that this is the smoothest sailing they’ve had on the Tasman sea ever. Must say we are due! After the Bay of Leone on the Costa Fortuna (126 km winds and snow) and the Atlantic crossing to Bermuda on the Celebrity Zenith where our brave captain ran through a Nor’easter that bobbed us around like a cork, it’s refreshing to have a smooth sailing for a change!

Not much going on around the ship but we’ve managed to keep ourselves busy. Have made trivia every day – and lost every day. Great team – but we’re always just shy of the winners. Yesterday we would have had a perfect score if we would have listened to our first gut instincts instead of 2nd guessing – oh well. It does keep us busy though!

Today we are sailing through the Fiordland National Park. It’s one of the largest national parks in the world with 3.5 million acres of forest clinging to steep cliffs. We sailed through Milford Sound which at it’s narrowest is 300 meters wide and the cliffs towered over the ship. We dropped off passengers here for an overland tour to the interior of New Zealand. As we were disembarking the passengers, the photographers were out in a zodiac taking photographs of all of us on the ship.


Back out of Milford sound, we then sailed through Thompson and Doubtful Sounds. More beautiful scenery, waterfalls, and cliffs and mountains. The park gets 300 inches of rain a year, but it’s been dry lately, so there aren’t as many waterfalls as usual, but there are still more than enough photo opportunities. As we pull out of Doubtful Sound, the fog and mist rolled in (along with some Snow), but it’s still a majestic site along the coast with the fog.