Friday, June 12, 2009

Approaching Gibraltar/ More Safety Drills

(Excerpt from the Ship's Librarian, June 3)
We arrived at the calm waters off Gibraltar on Tuesday morning June 2 about 6:00, but we won’t anchor until Friday. As I said in an earlier post, the Captain has gotten us out of bad weather approaching the Azores where we were supposed to do more safety drills. We are instead doing them here. We’re going to be doing man-overboard, fire and equipment drills.

It is a tease being so close to land and not being able to go ashore. Many of the people on the ship have cell phones that are European compatible and now we are in range, are using them constantly calling home.

The regimental staff is planning various tours for when we get to land. One I hope to go on is to Morocco, a short ferry ride across the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean to north Africa. I am also considering going into Spain somewhere on the Costa del Sol. There are beautiful beaches and towns there. I’d like to get to Malaga about 50 miles away. There is the Picasso Museum there among some others. I want to see some original flamenco dancing as well.

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