Saturday, March 14, 2020

Day 15/71: Sunday March 15, 2020: At Sea

Got another letter this morning. Australia will close all its ports to cruise ships effective today. Many African ports as well as those of Spain, Portugal and France are also closing. Hence there is no continuation option for this cruise. Instead of docking in Brisbane tomorrow, we have been instructed to sail directly to Sydney, arriving on the 17th. The announcement by the Captain was completely clear, but it sounds like we will remain on board the ship until we can depart on the 20th to leave the country.

I sent an email to the Loan Pine Koala Sanctuary, in Brisbane, requesting they cancel the our reservations we made for tomorrow. It was going to be very nice!

Yesterday, we made reservations for all three of us at the Hot Rock Grill tonight and for the La Dame on the 18th.





Just before noon, the seas really started to get heavy. Tropical cyclone Gretel is catching up to us.



El Capitan made a PA announcement (in his barely intelligible broken French/English) this evening saying that the Port of Sydney is closed, but we (as well as others) have applied for an exception so that we can enter. He did not say when we might get a response.

1 comment:

  1. Sorry the cruise is turning out this way, we appreciate the updates and enjoy reading about your adventures. Those daily activity itineraries are amazing, so much going on, wish we could have experienced that. Hopefully you will avoid too much impact from the cyclone and be allowed to port in Sydney and catch your flights home. We visited the Brisbane koala sanctuary back in 1985, quite good. We flew in a KC-135 tanker jet from Guam to a military base in Brisbane. Got to take the whole family (didn't have Jeff yet) and observe the refueling of a B-52 first hand on the way.

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