Day Nine, Monday 7th February, Flying things.

Day Nine, Monday 7^th February, Flying things.

Last nights show was very entertaining.  We had a singer on first, followed by the violinist with a sense of humour.  Good stuff!  After that, a cup of coffee and a few minutes on the internet uploading blogs and stuff in the Iceni lounge, then downstairs to the cabin to watch the video film that Peter has been taking all day.  He has captured Mindelo very well.  It’s a shabby town, but we are told by Ann, the port speaker that it has been cleaned up and much improved in the last five years.  Me n Peter quite liked place, unlike most of the other passengers.

This morning was breakfast as usual in the Secret Garden, and then up in deck for our constitutional mile.  It must have taken us nearly 2 hours to make it round the deck 5 times, because we were mesmerized by the flying fish.  Everyone has been seeing them all morning. There seemed to be two types, but maybe they are one type really and confusing us by behaving differently?  Occasionally, a little cloud of them would appear and rush away from the ship.  These fish were small and appeared silvery winged (or finned).   And then there were larger, single fish.  These “flew” for quite a distance, some were brown, and others had a wonderful blueish tint, with silver underbellies which they displayed to us as they banked in a curve away from the ship.  As I said, we were transfixed for hours.  Peter tried to film them, but they were camera shy to start off with, and when they did appear, they raced across the surface too fast for him to keep up.  If he did manage to catch them on film, I’ll be able to put a picture on here later.

Then, after a good hour or so and after a couple of hundred fish, a bird appeared?  The Captain told us in his morning announcements that we are about 250 nautical miles away from land so everyone was puzzled about where this bird had come from.  Mebbe the ornithologist guy will be able to tell us what it is, and what it was doing here.  Again, Peter filmed it, so we may have a pic of that too.

We carried on seeing the fish all day until sunset, and I saw another bird, smaller than the first, skimming across the waves this afternoon.  I will try and work out it was so far out to sea.

The rest of the day was uneventful really, lunch outside, 54 in Peters class, and Western night this evening, so we put on our bandanas and cowboy hats and enjoyed the “Hoe Down”, tonights show.

All in all a nice day