We were at sea on January 30, 2025.

Oh, no!  We were running out of cruise!  We had a sea day, Melbourne, and then one last sea day before leaving the ship in Sydney.

There are lots of activities to choose from on sea days.   This was our itinerary for the day.

It was an interesting coffee chat session with Captain Smit.  He has been sailing over 35 years on Holland and been the captain on Westerdam for most of those.  He has never aspired to captain the larger,  newer ships.  He also enjoys sailing the Asia routes, which is where Westerdam usually is when not in Alaska.  He said many captains don’t prefer Asia because of the language challenges.  Also, it is often a new country every day with varying laws and requirements and facilities.

This is his first time captaining a ship in the South Pacific.  That only happened because another Holland ship went into dry dock in Singapore so the company shifted the Westerdam.  The other ship will sail Asia for this year after coming out of dry dock.

In general, he shares the Westerdam with another captain and they go three months on – three months off, back-and-forth.

From there, we went straight to a talk with Eli about our next port,  Melbourne.  Eli was a hoot and made every place sound like a grand time.

We did learn that the infamous Vegemite is made in Melbourne. (The air around the factory was declared a cultural site.) We had not yet tried it, but Eli said everyone needed to. In a memorable moment, Randy was making a face in response to something the woman sitting next to him (not me) said about Vegemite when Eli called him out. Eli asked Randy if he’d ever tried Vegemite and Randy said no. Eli then told Randy he shouldn’t “yuck on someone else’s yum.” It was all in good fun and hilarious since Eli had spent ten minutes telling us how he couldn’t stand oysters!

Eli told us that Chinatown in Melbourne is the oldest outside of Asia.   It is where dim sims were developed.

He encouraged all of us to eat kangaroo saying that Australia was the only country in the world that eats their national animal.

Randy had a blast in his latest Mixology class.

This is our favorite bar attendant, Emely.  She will be on Nieuw Statendam when we are aboard that ship this summer.

Augustin “performed” an anniversary service for students and they all had a class photo. Notice that the stole he used was just a tape from the cash register.

I watched for a while and then went to get seats in the world theater for the latest program on Australia.

There is a lot to see all around Australia if we ever come back!

When talking about Cairnes, somewhere we did go on this trip, Eli said the size of the great barrier reef is equivalent of the US shoreline between Maine and Georgia.

Following that, we went back to the Ocean Bar for drinks.  I had my regular, Chianti, while Randy invited Augustin to “surprise me” and make drinks of his choice. Randy had heard many bartenders on ships like to show their creative talent behind the bar, rather than pour premade Margaritas all day.

The first was called a Midori Sour. We both liked it. Augustin called the second drink “medicine.”  We assumed that it included bitters because he had talked about bitters being medicine in the class. Augustine did confirm it was mostly bitters, which has a high alcohol content (35-45% alcohol by volume.) Just right for Randy! It did cure Randy’s ailments, even though he didn’t know he had any.

While sitting there playing with pictures, we discovered that Randy could remove his knee and a glass of water behind his Midori Sour photograph. He was able to do it on his iPhone 15 Pro but I could not do it from my iPhone 15.  So, I need a better phone or he needs to be the photo editor. He said the former. 

(We did learn later that I can make those edits on my iPad! I had fun changing out many photos that way, like the one above from Lima where I removed the other person in the lower right of the original photo. In a lovers embrace, we didn’t need an extraneous guy photo bombing our picture. Yes, I always knew it was possible using photo editing but I’ve always been far more interested in the writing than the photography.)

Back to the sea day….

We had dinner at Canaletto again and had a nice view.

Bonus – We saw dolphins from our dinner table window!

After dinner we went to the Rolling Stone Lounge, site of the Orange Party.  The Orange Party is traditional on Holland America cruises. We even brought orange clothing to wear this time but skipped the party as it was way too late for us with an early excursion the next day.

The cruise director from Scotland, Grant, interviewed Security Officer, John, also from Scotland.  We were mostly used to Grant’s Scottish brogue but John’s was so hard to understand! It was fun to listen to two Scot’s talk to each other like they would back in Scotland. Still, it was an interesting discussion about his second career on board after being a “copper”(police officer) for 30 years.

Someone asked about security measures the ship can take against outside attack.  He said the ship is too big to be boarded and too fast to be caught by most boats.  If those would fail, the ship has powerful water hoses that could be turned on an intruder.

We finished our night with another concert by Bernard Walz, a premier pianist from Australia.

Next up: We arrive in Melbourne on mainland Australia- a new continent for us!