8am came and went and there was no announcement from the Captain as to when we would be cleared to be underway again. We all wondered what was going on and of course some speculated the worst!
Finally, late morning, around 11am, the Captain announced that we had been cleared to be on with our journey, however, we first had an emergency to deal with. One of the passengers was in need of a hospital with capabilities far a beyond what our on board "infirmary" could provide. The Captain advised that a med-vac helicopter was on its way and asked that we all stay off the decks until after the helicopter left. Of course, most of us wanted to know / see / watch what was happening and headed straight to places where we would have the best vantage point to see.
The ship does not have a heli-port so it had to be a hovering procedure. First step was to get a rescuer on deck, that happened. The winds from Oswald were still strong so it was quite a precarious procedure.
Passengers and crew alike were "at the ready" with cameras just under the glass where the helicopter was hovering. One good thing the helicopter props did was to blow all the water off the pool deck! Saved the crew some work!
Lifting up a rescuer and the passenger. Tom had been at the other end of the pool deck with his video camera, wish I could figure out how to post video here, and in reviewing the video, we did see that the passenger was standing, without support as they prepared him for the lift.
All the rescuers and the passenger on the helicopter, off it went.
That taken care of, the crew went back to more important work, feeding the rest of us! Today was the Australia BBQ on the pool deck.
Finally on our way around 1pm - 1:30. YEAH! The Captain had already broken the bad news to us that, because of the two day delay, we would be skipping Whitsunday Island and Cairns and heading straight for Cooktown. LOTS and LOTS of unhappy campers cruisers! This meant the tours for snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef were cancelled. Folks talked to the Captain, wrote e-mails to corporate asking that we go to Cairns instead of Cooktown but, alas, all to no avail. We would have two more sea days before stepping on good old terra firma again!
Seeing blue sky and green hills was quite a treat!
We chose to have lunch in the Compass Rose (main dining room) on Deck 4 and from here could see the swells almost up to the windows. This is about 2 1/2 decks above the water line, thus probably 20-25 feet!
Desert was SOO pretty, I just couldn't resist including a pic:
Out on the deck, we can see just how choppy the seas are as we pass by the not-so-sunny Sunshine Coast towns.
Really, truly hate missing the Great Barrier Reef up close even as we pass between there and the mainland. There were folks on this segment (Sydney to Singapore) for whom this was the most important part of the trip. But, most importantly, we are all safe and Oswald will soon be fully behind us! NOTE: Word came out, unofficially, that the air-lifted passenger had some heart issues.
rf
No comments:
Post a Comment