Five weeks aboard today! We are now honing in on Pitcairn Island which we will reach tomorrow morning. The home of the Bounty Mutineers and a tiny dot in the middle of a lot of blue wilderness.

More boilingness! Obviously, not complaining. So lovely to have the chance to lie out with a book and work on the tan. Pretty much similar day to yesterday really. Breakfast:swim:read (repeat multiple times); lunch; swim, art, rehearsal, swim…

Two nice surprises. One is that we have managed to get on a trip in Tasmania to the nature area around Cradle Mountain. I was having a problem arranging it and we were on a wait list but have now received tickets. The second was that P&O have kindly deposited an extra 250 internet minutes worth £75 into our account.

This is the end of a long running saga, too boring to blog about in detail. However, the gist is that although our time online is logged in minutes and seconds, when that time is subtracted from the time bought for our account, the time used is always rounded up to the next whole minute i.e. get to the end of the session and it tells you, you have used 1 minute, 1 second then find that 2 minutes have been deducted from your account. This sounds minor but over 105 days, it could easily add up to 100s of minutes lost. Well, not lost….. taken…. Stolen…. Appropriated. Not stated in their T&Cs either. I had several interesting conversations with the Internet Manager, then the Reception Staff and finally wrote one of my better Exocet letters to the Executive Purser (Hotel General Manager ashore). Fraudulent activity might have been mentioned….. He wrote back within hours and arranged for us to meet with the Customer Services Manager, a very nice chap. I have to say he parroted on all the stuff we'd heard before about "that's the way the system works" etc. but at the end of the day he had to concede that the way the system worked was not as described in their T&Cs and ….. that word beginning with "f" came up again!!!! I feel a bit sorry for them as their systems are truly woeful, all outsourced and outside of their control. But on the other hand….

So, back to the cabin at about 5:45, check the emails, shower and a Pisco Sour. Bob has what he calls a Power Nap and I call Out Cold Zonko Snoring….

You may have noticed I haven't mentioned bridge for a couple of days. We haven't given up. It's only alternate sea days anyway and also in our Improvers group there are now people who came on in Rio, were beginners to Valparaiso and then joined us in Improvers but were "behind" us. They've been catching up which allowed us to have a couple of days off. Tomorrow we are supposed to have a play tournament amongst ourselves bit there is a very likely clash with arrival at Pitcairn, so not sure what will happen. Watch this space.

Our clocks have been going back 1 hour every night now since we left Easter Island and we go back another hour tonight. So today we were GMT -7 and tomorrow we are GMT -8. We have to get in line before arrival in Tahiti on Monday when I think we have to be GMT -11. Boggle Boggle. We want to ring the girls from Papeete but can't decide whether to ring them when we arrive which will probably be about 11am our time by the time we get ashore ie 10pm Monday night UK time, 11pm Paris time, or wait till later that night (our time) and ring them at what would be breakfast time on Tuesday in Europe.

Lovely night tonight sitting up on deck for one of the "Tropical Nights" where everyone goes in their gaudiest shirts, drinks cocktails and dances to the live band under the stars.