After an awesome night’s sleep we wake for our first full sea day. We have five of them until we port in Hawaii. We’ve set our cabin up, it is home for 28 days as we cruise some 12,900km across the Pacific Ocean. We are in a Sky Suite, 10100. It’s a forward cabin, starboard side, just behind and under the bridge. We have a balcony, lounge, king sized bed, and plenty of storage. A bathroom with bath, shower, and a separate toilet. We’ve fully unpacked and wake up ready to explore, experience, and enjoy everything Edge has to offer, plus get in plenty of downtime as we glide across the ocean.
We sleep with our balcony door open. There’s something about the sound of the ocean and the gentle pitching and rolling of the ship. It’s quite calm as we navigate away from the mainland and head for open water. The ship cuts its way through the water, making 18 knots, the occasional swell crashing into the hull, the water frothing and foaming as we beat a path westward.
We get ready for the day and decide to go to the theatre to listen to Brent Nixon. Brent’s been doing this a long time, a marine researcher and naturalist who’s spent decades studying whales, bears, and just about everything else that moves in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, with footage he’s contributed to National Geographic, Animal Planet, and Discovery Channel along the way, and over 1,500 presentations behind him at this point. He’s the kind of speaker who could talk about paint drying and still hold a room, so an hour on orcas was never going to be a hard sell.
Today Brent is talking about orca. Don’t call it a killer whale. Brent has a presence about him, engaging, funny, authentic, but above all, he knows his stuff. He captivates us for 45 minutes talking about these beautiful creatures. He describes in colourful detail orca’s advanced global language, their ability to learn, modify behaviour, and teach their young. He describes the matriarchal social structure, their ability to alter gestation, and ensure genetic mixing among pods. It’s an amazing talk. Brent also explains orcas are technically dolphins, the largest in the family, and different populations, resident, transient, and offshore, don’t just look different, they hunt differently, speak different dialects, and don’t interbreed even when their ranges overlap. Resident pods eat almost exclusively fish, while transients, the type we saw off Vancouver, hunt marine mammals, which explains Luke’s grotesque commentary from the whale watching cruise a few days back. A pod’s dialect is passed down and refined generation to generation, distinct enough that researchers can identify which family group is calling just from the pattern of clicks and whistles. The whole talk is captivating and fascinating. Brent has a unique style, he mimics the orcas, describes through words, body motion and humorous hand gestures various traits and behaviours.
After the talk we sit in the Retreat Lounge for a little while before heading to lunch. For lunch today, Mardi has a feta salad and grilled salmon while I have a lettuce, bacon, and egg salad and the Luminae signature burger. I wanted a good lunch today because our next activity is whiskey tasting, and when I say we, I mean I’ll be doing the tasting, and Mardi might be the one carrying me back to our room afterwards.
For the tasting today we are enjoying three variations of the Macallan colour range, a 12 year old, a 15 year old, and an 18 year old. But before we get into the tasting, Bryan, our host, gives us a little bit of history about Macallan, a Speyside distillery with almost 200 years of history, founded in 1824 by farmer Alexander Reid on the banks of the River Spey.
The Macallan Colour Collection each has a different natural colour and character entirely from the wood alone, no added caramel colouring, just what the sherry-seasoned oak has done to the spirit over the years. The 12 year old is a golden oak, all summer freshness, green apple and lemon rounded out with ginger and dried fruit, the lightest and brightest of the three. The 15 steps up to a rich beech colour, gentler and rounder, vanilla toffee and candied orange peel with a touch of crystallised ginger, finishing on sweet citrus pastry, vanilla custard, and baked peach. The 18 is the deepest, a light auburn built on eighteen years in sherry oak from Jerez de la Frontera, clementine and panna cotta up front, baked apple and sultana underneath, vanilla sponge and milk chocolate carrying through to a finish of sweet oak and orange
I found the tasting to be delicious. The 15 year old was my preferred flavour. All were very nice.
After the tasting, we went back to the Retreat Lounge and took it easy for the early part of the afternoon. Mardi did some knitting while I did a little bit of writing and caught up on some emails from work. We sit and enjoy the afternoon sun and let the afternoon move along at its own pace. The panoramic windows in the lounge offer sweeping southern views, its port side.
We return to our room for a quick break and change for Evening Chic night. Before dinner we enjoy a drink or three in Martinis, a delightful bar and lounge with an impressive light installation. We watch and listen and chat. A lot of people have also dressed in Evening Chic. There are sparkly gowns, suits, tuxedos, and colourful dresses everywhere. Mardi wears a handmade raspberry ensemble and I am in a suit. We sample some interesting martini variants. Music by the DJ is an eclectic mix of tracks from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. We eventually head up to dinner. For starters it’s beef tartare for Mardi and Jerusalem artichoke soup for me. Mains for both of us is lobster and cauliflower. After dinner we wander through the casino and spend some time at the craps table before Mardi spots our favourite slot machine, are they still called that, favourite because it’s got cats on it, as well as bats and rats. Shortly after a few rolls of the dice and a few goes on the machine, we call it a night.
One of the interesting things about cruising east to west is that our days are all 25 hours long, the clock progressively going back an hour every night, until we hit the international date line. Then we lose a whole day, before catching a few more extended days. So we set our clocks back, ready for another long, relaxing day.
