One of the comforting things about being a passenger at sea is the reassuring certainty that even in the modern world, when targets, schedules and deadlines dominate daily life, for the duration of the voyage, it is quite difficult to do much, other than to observe the slow but certain passage of time as the ocean waves roll by. In my case, this was assisted by an inexplicable but convenient failure of my devices to log in to the on board wi-fi.