At Sea, Western Australia, Mar 20, 2020

And the beeline continues, oh hold on wait, we have a medical emergency where a guest needs to be disembarked by helicopter. You cannot make this stuff up. Late this morning there was a medical call to a guest’s room. This afternoon an announcement was made that this guest will need to be airlifted from the ship somewhere around Geraldton. This was a seamless process with the ship pulling within 60 miles of the coast and barely slowing down as the rescue helicopter came around and long line lifted the guest of the bow fo the ship. There was not enough room for the helicopter to land and yes, all the outer decks were closed as well as all deck facing the front of the ship - yes, a little privacy please. Amazing how these rescue operators work, all done within 30 minutes. We continue with the foot to the floor.

We finally received our evacuation instructions, although we are not totally pleased of our route we are learning to live with the restricted flight availability and the fact that it is important that we do get home as soon as possible. We are staying on board until the morning of the 23rd, we need to get off between 8 and 9 in the morning although our first flight doesn’t leave until 11:25pm. HAL has come through with providing us with a day room at a local hotel to stay in before we need to go to the airport. We fly from Perth to Melbourne, then after a 3 hour wait we head to Los Angelas, then another 3 hour wait before heading back to Vancouver. We should be home by about 12:30 pm, March 24th.

We also had a Mariner Good Bye wrap up dinner tonight with our retiring Captain Jonathon Mercer. I actually happened to stumble into a bit of a private party for the Captain at about 7:15 tonight in the Crow’s Nest and yes since I knew a great number of participants I was invited in and although not dressed the part was able to get a great picture with the Captain - he is really a very nice guy that was dealt with most unfortunate situation on his last run at the helm. We had a very nice dinner with Joanne and Michael (FCC’s) hosting our table, a very appropriate end for us on this cruise. We continue to say goodbye to all the friends that we have me and re-met on board. Today we also had an abbreviated version of a first ever combined, Indonesian / Filipino show - very well done and not a dry eye in the house.

So, we continue to wind down, very emotional on many fronts… A few pics of our day, hope you enjoy…

Quote of the day - “Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished by you ability.” - John Wooden