So, a very lovely warm, sunny day at sea. The wind was a bit brisk first thing and the pools were half empty and staging mini hurricanes, but it was still gorgeous to lie out with a book. Which we did, for the morning. It is still very warm -- 27C. Hopefully it will remain so for a few more days as yet. We have 5 sea days between Antigua and the Azores. Then 3 days and Southampton. Bob nearly choked on his sausage this morning as he overheard a man telling his wife that he couldn't understand why it took 3 days to get to Southampton from the Azores because they were just off the coast of Cornwall. That would be the Scilly Isles……

Then after lunch we had our new art class with the new tutor. Zut alors!!!!! He is very nice but paints in a totally -totally-different style from the previous chap. Now, this wouldn't be a problem if we weren't total newbies and had only ever experienced painting via the James method. However…. Now we have to do something completely different and it's quite frightening. And horrible for him really. He expects that as we've all been painting for 3 months that we know the basics or what he considers to be the basics. But we don't…… We know how to paint a picture a day using James' methods that have gradually made us grow from painting the silhouette of a tree in front of a sunset sky to a rather detailed landscape. However….. we have never been taught how to move the brush properly; how much water to use for different situations; how to paint without drawing first….. YIKES! So he had a bit of a shock and so did we…. It's going to be an interesting couple of weeks. Hopefully we will learn a lot more.

By the time we got out of that, it was time to go back to our cabin and tidy up ready for our first "drinks" event. We'd invited Mick and Maureen for drinks and snacks before dinner and then to eat dinner together. By this time our cabin is like a little art exhibition which brightens it but it is still about 1/3 of the size of theirs. Anyway, we had g&t, wines of all colours, golden rum and ginger beer or coke, olives and crisps. All very nice and they were very taken with our cabinetto LOL. Formal dress tonight so a good dinner menu too. After dinner we went to see Tom O'Connor. Actually, I have to eat my words of yesterday, because despite being incredibly ancient and slightly lispy after his stroke, he was very very funny and told joke after joke for over 45 minutes to gales of laughter. A class act.