Sleep

If anyone on this ship said that he/she slept better than I did last night, then they would be lying.  The seas calmed substantially. The shipboard audio-visual folks have 3 channels of movies/videos showing every night.  I only made it halfway through "Blue Hawaii" before I fell asleep for the night.  Yes, Elvis is alive and living on this ship. The other sleep bonus was that we went through another time zone, so we are now 5 hours behind the east coast. It's 8:30 am here as I am writing and  1:30 pm back in Virginia.  It's day A3 on the class schedule.

The LLCs (Learning, Living Coordinators) are doing a great job of programming activies for the students on the ship.  One of those was a "speed friending" event where the students tried to meet as many other students as they could in a short period of time.  I walked by, and they were heavily engaged.  I think there was a contest at the end to see who could name the most people.

Left: Academic Dean, Mark White. Center: Executive Dean, Loren Crabtree

On the faculty/staff side, the Dean's sponsored a reception for the Life Long Learners.  This is a group of adults who want to be part of  this university environment but are no longer students. Most are retired folks and they are totally integrated into ship life--eating, classes, port trips, etc.  Nancy and I had the pleasure of eating dinner with a group of ladies who are seniors.   Two were from Alberta, Canada, and one is an active golfer and plays in a curling league.  The rough seas were hard on them, but they're up and attending classes.

One of last night's Explorer Seminars was with Sal Moscella who is one of the SAS executives.  He talked about sustainability on the ship.  The MV Explorer is ISO 1401 certified which means that it is certified "green". 
A few facts about the ship and the challenges of being sustainable, managing water, electricity and waste
 The fall 09 voyage used 2,261 lbs of peanut butter.
The ship makes its own water while at sea using a desalination/filtering/chlorination process.  It has the capability to make 150,000 gals per day while it only needs about 50,000 gals per day.
The ship uses 1.6 metric tons of fuel per hour for propulsion and another .65 metric tons per hour for generating electricity.
The ship uses washable cups instead of paper.  They save water by not using trays in the dining rooms. All bathrooms use low flush toilets. Everything possible is recycled.

It makes you proud to be on this ship.