Not much to report. Overnight was a mix of sleeping and trying to sleep in the full ocean swell. Then after a short period of relative calm it became rough again as we entered Bass Strait. Lee was marginally better and able to shower and go with me to buffet lunch. We tackled another puzzle sheet - there has been one of these each day available in the library - today's was all words ending in "-ical". It can be hard explaining cruise life - a daily puzzle sounds pretty naff and unworthy of note bit in fact it represents the way that a cruise ship outperforms most resort hotels on land.
We've made our final duty-free purchases. Soon we'll have to tackle the logistics of repacking to leave the ship. We have to have our suitcases out by 10pm, which pretty much means a quiet last night in the cabin as we'll need to only leave out tomorrow's clothes. We'll have to keep all declarable items with hand-luggage. We've been advised that the port has poor facilities for handling taxis - something we partly observed when boarding. That's certainly one area where Singapore is well ahead. If Melbourne wants to be a serious cruise destination then the port needs major improvements. I'm suspecting that we might both be later getting to work tomorrow than we expected.
In between spates of languid lying in the cabin I went up to the top deck to watch the turgid water. Bass strait lives up to its wild reputation, the waves are deep and high and make me glad we're on such a large vessel. Mostly there's been no shipping in sight but I did see one fully laden ANL container ship race past. On our left Flinders Island came up from the obscurity into clarity. Having crossed so much open ocean it seemed odd to take so long plying the strait.
Around the ship, quite a large number of people have already put their luggage out for collection. The sure sign that a cruise is nearing its end.
That said this process of putting luggage out the night before is new to us and is not welcome. On other cruises we've been able to mostly pack the night before but get up, shower and change before finalising the packing.
With the suitcases out and collected we watched a movie in our cabin.
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