Last night we changed time zones for the second time. We are now eleven hours ahead of the time at home. This is the fourth of five sea days in a row. We had breakfast in the Colonnade then spent the morning in the suite reading, writing and relaxing.

We passed through the Bab el Mandeb Strait at the bottom of the Red Sea this morning. Islands of Yemen were visible off the port side from our suite. When we went to breakfast, we sat on the starboard side and could see islands of Djibouti out that window.

This morning we entered the internationally recognized transit zone of the Gulf of Aden which is protected (by a coalition of the European Union Naval Force Somalia) and will stay in it until tomorrow evening when we have passed Yemen and are ready to head straight to Salalah, Oman.

Cyclone Megh was ahead of us crossing in this area a few days ago, but made landfall at Yemen yesterday and has weakened considerably. The weather now is very nice with just enough breeze to cool the veranda nicely. We have had very good weather overall with only a little bit of rain on the veranda one evening early in the cruise.

During the captain's announcement today at noon, he said that he had fired up another generator and we were speeding along at over 17 knots. This is the fastest we have traveled so far, but he will keep it up until we have passed through the pirate area off the horn of Africa. When I have checked our stats of position and speed available on the captain’s TV channel, we have been going anywhere from 7.5 to 13.5 knots on other days. The sea is very smooth, only a few whitecaps, so the ride is fine. This ship is fairly small compared to most cruise ships, but it does have stabilizers.

We went to another of Terry Ellis’ talks this afternoon about the British Invasion, and then went downstairs to the club and played the music trivia game. One of our team members from last night’s game was there so we quickly joined forces and enlisted a couple from British Columbia and a woman from England. Came in at second place this time, and had a lot of fun.

Dinner in The Restaurant tonight was the chef’s tasting menu which was wonderful. My favorite meal is still the one we had on Monday, but this was a close second. Six courses consisted of salmon tartare with caviar, spicy tomato soup cream, palate cleanser of lemon and thyme sorbet with champagne, main courses catfish and prawns for Phil and tournedos of beef with crisp fois gras for me, chocolate raspberry tart, and finished with coffee, tea, and bite-size profiteroles. All very good. I forgot to bring the menu back to the room so I can’t list all the details or the chef’s wording for the dishes.