13 - Sailing the Coral Sea, Sergey is back!

 It's a sea day, much appreciated after yesterday's full day of riding the RIB.  

> This morning was guest lecture with Captain Vikram Hede:  "Keeping the Reef Great": how corals form and how to conserve the reef.  About 50% of the Great Barrier Reef has died in the last 30 years. 

The reefs form on the continental shelf, which is 3 - 8 meters under water, and relatively close to land.  The depth gives the perfect amount of sunlight for growth of coral.

                                       

                                      

The greatest threats to the reefs are:

    1 Climate Change. The reefs cannot handle large swings in temp.   If faced with a few short ones, they can recover.  But the recovery time is getting shorter and shorter, the swings bigger and bigger.

    2 Cyclones. Cyclone Debbie occurred in 2017 with recorded wind speeds of 285 km/hr.

    3 Coral bleaching.

    4 Crown of thorns starfish.  These predators eat the coral at alarmingly high rates.  If found they are injected with solution that kills the startfish.

Coral mass spawning occurs once at year with the full  blood moon.  At night all the corals simultaneously spawn.  They says it is beautiful.

Coral reefs are all over the world,  areas closer to the equator will have more reefs.  Florida is 3rd largest area for reefs.

                                       

>Then a  Q&A session with the ship's Sr. Officers. 

Nothing terribly new except the move to more fuel efficient ships, nuclear, electric.  There are only three ports that can handle electric plugs ins from the already capable Viking ships, one is at their home base in Bergen.  The Viking Ocean ships use 4 tons of fuel per hr.  Fuel costs $500 per ton.  The ship holds 1000 tons of fuel.  You do the math, today's fuel is expensive.

>Baggo competition. This is very similar to our corn hole.  The baggo field is top of the stairs (tossers) to the bottom of the stairs (the target).  There are regular competitions between passengers and crew.  The crew usually win, probably because they practice with every sailing.

> Yoga - you bet I got a nice long yoga session in. Sooo very nice.

> Piano

Sergey is back at the piano.  He is from the Ukraine and plays the music that I know and love, from the Nutcracker suite to Mozart and Edward Grieg.  He ended one set with "It's Time to Say Good Bye" another favorite.  He played a couple of days at the beginning of the cruise, then disappeared for 6 days.  Covid - maybe?  We are glad he's back.

                      

                          As of noon today we were half way to Brisbane Australia.

> Passenger Christmas carolers led us in Christmas carols.  Viking staff served hot chocolate today.