Heavy Sea Olympics

When there is a long stretch at sea, there are special events planned to break up the routine of going to class every day. It was 12 days ago that we sailed from India, so in that time we have:

- had Neptune Day as we crossed the equator (remember the silly fish picture)
- stopped in Mauritius to refuel. We went snorkeling for most of the 8 hours we were there, but I forgot the camera so no pics.
- had Sea Olympics while we sailed in some bouncy waves two days ago.

Sea Olympics are a day-long competition with lots of silly events. The students are organized in "seas" (Carribean, Mediterranean, Baltic, etc) based on which deck and side they live on, much like residence halls. There is also one sea for all of the faculty, staff (except resident directors who lead their seas), dependent family members, and various others like the folks in the Unreasonable at Sea program. We got to pick our own sea name, so we were "Luna-Sea" and our team color was gray.

A good effort was made to include the dependent children in as many events as possible, though the boys were all quite disappointed they were excluded from the very rough dodgeball tournament. We held our own in quite a few events, including "Ship, Wave, Captain" which is played like "Rock, Paper, Scissors." Jr was the champion from our team for that game! There was an exciting game of Ninja, a very long relay race involving carrying pingpong balls on spoons to various events (I did it twice, not easy with the ship rolling), and a trivia competition. Sr was supposed to be in a wet-suit relay, but high seas made all the water slosh out of the pool so it got scrapped. The highlight of the Sea Olympics is usually the performances, both in synchronized swimming and lip-syncing. We were not disappointed, even though the synchronized swimming ended up being done in the Union. Teams were highly creative in how they conveyed the feel of the being fish out of water. The winning Carribean Sea team had sleek black swimsuits and a seriously synchronized performance, one of our library students starred in that show. Our team was made up of four of the fathers sporting three-year-old Sydney's pink shorts on their heads. We didn't win that one. This is a family-friendly blog, so no bathing suit shots here ;-)

We land in Cape Town tomorrow. We will explore the city a bit the first day, then head out to a safari for a few days before coming back to Cape Town for two more days. The weather is in the 70s here, which is hard to get used to after the high temperatures of South and Southeast Asia. Not that I am complaining about sweatshirt weather and nice breezes just yet.