A Life on the Ocean Wave

5 March 2004. A day at sea as the cruise ship Carousel sails from Agadir in Morocco towards Madeira.

We start the day with a good breakfast - we need the energy to walk 5 times round the crowded Promenade Deck to complete a mile. Oh... er... well, not so crowded then...

Then we spend much of the day lazing on the Pool Deck. The weather is gorgeous and the sunbeds are fully loaded with the bodies gorgeous - not so easily spotted amongst the bodies bloated... I kept mine covered - the world is not ready for that to be unleashed!

The Entertainments Crew kept us all amused with more silly competitions - this being the Duckathon... No I can't remember the details, but it was something along the lines of the plastic ducks having to be rescued from the pool and deposited somewhere against the clock and the one who rescued most was the winner. Something like that.

I had my nose in my book most of the day - Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and (according to Fran) a steady stream of snorts of laughter issued from me embarrassing her no end... I'm sure she exaggerates... At one point two pods of dolphins passed the ship all leaping in unison, around 60 of them altogether - a wonderful sight. Later another couple flashed at extreme speed right under my nose as I looked down the side of the ship at the sea. It spoiled us - I've never seen as many again on a cruise - in fact on the last two cruises we did we didn't see any at all.

In the afternoon one of the chefs came out to carve fruit into animals. Good entertaining stuff on a cruise ship - didn't impress Simon Cowell much on Britain's Got Talent a couple of months ago, but on a lazy day on a cruise ship you just go with the flow!

As the ship was at sea, the casino and all the shops were open. We had a wander around the ship and Fran got rid of a tenner's worth of tokens on the fruit machines in a most efficient manner! Join us soon for tomorrow's trip to Madeira!

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One-Armed Bandits

When I was a nipper and we lived in Rochdale, a trip to the seaside meant these things as much as it meant going on the beach or paddling in the sea. Arcades in the 1950s were full of the sounds of mechanical cogs clicking, ticking and grinding away.

The Copper Sega above was a slightly later model than the wood-cased Beromat below. Each had their own distinctive sounds. The Sega's reels came to an abrupt stop.

The Beromat's reels were slowed by what sounded like a ratchet until they stopped. The machines required no electricity and could be sited anywhere. There were no features such as hold or nudge. All the player could do to try to influence the game was either pull the handle with a sharp yank, or pull it slowly and steadily. It probably made no difference whatsoever, but whichever method you preferred, you tried the other after a steady spell of losing...

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