Warm, sun and cloud sea day with little wind but a long rolling swell, visible from the decks. This part of the Eastern Pacific is an empty vast wilderness of water with nothing to stop the waves in their progress. Just the odd rock or tiny islet here and there, and then nothing else, all the way to Easter Island, 3 days steam due west…. Again it makes me reflect on the bravery of the old maritime explorers. Our only comparable adventure is space, and we don't go there without all the backup technology, detailed flight-plans, maps, and a known way back. We know exactly how far our destination is, and indeed that our destination actually exists. The maritime explorers were often sailing to destinations based on legend with little or nothing in the way of maps and charts. If they ran out of food, like Magellan, they ate rats and sawdust bound into biscuits by candle tallow. When that ran out….they starved to death. Many sailors expected to fall off the end of the world if they sailed far enough. I suppose our nearest equivalent really would be to send a manned spaceship into a black hole. Sadly, our age really doesn't do grand scale exploration anymore and I suppose that's because the sort of projects it would take are no longer possible for the individual but need the backing of multiple states and corporations and they have other calls on their money.

Anyway, today, as we ploughed westwards across the Pacific, we merry explorers played bridge and sunbathed. I went to a camera club seminar on Photographing Wildlife which was not very informative at all to be honest. We then painted three fisherwoman mending nets in art (not one of my best but Bob's was lovely) and then I went to the second Amdram meeting. Luckily far fewer people came back today and notably absent were Lord and Lady Eyelashes. We split into four groups and each read a different 15 minutes radio play based on the doings of an amateur dramatic society in a village called Little Grimley. Our group's is called Last Tango in Little Grimley and centres around the society's desperate efforts to sell tickets to a sex farce in the face of a cash crisis due to their dismal previous track record of performance. This reminds me vividly of my past in amateur dramatics when we too were desperate for funds and turned to selling illegal home brew during the intervals. Ah, those were the days. Anyway, today part allocation was totally random and I find myself playing Joyce who, I believe, on a first read, must be the stereotypical dimwit. I don't have a huge amount of lines but I get to do a lot of comic business involving flapping around like a bird…. You get the picture I'm sure. LOL. Don't expect any recordings, photos or video!