Day 8 - Grand Turk?

As I type this out on our balcony, I can see Grand Turk as a small sliver of land on the horizon. Unfortunately, it’s behind us. It’s also nearly 45 minutes after the time we were supposed to dock. It seems as if the seas are too rough, due to very high winds, for the pilot to get out to the ship. For those of you who aren’t cruisers, at each port a “pilot” from that port is required to board the ship and guide the boat in to the dock. They come along-side the ship on a small motorized boat and climb up a ladder to the bridge to assume control of the ship. The same activity happens in reverse when we leave the port. I’m not exactly sure why the guy who drives the boat the rest of the time can’t do this, but maybe it’s better not to know too much!

We called guest services a few minutes ago and they said that they are “waiting and hoping for the best”. We are not sure what that means, since we continue to speed away from Grand Turk at 17 kn.

Update – there was just an announcement from the captain saying that we will not be able to dock in Grand Turk due to the weather. It is very windy; one of the deck chairs is blowing across our balcony. Fortuitously, we decided to cancel our dive in Grand Turk yesterday morning due to Andrew’s ear issues. If we had not done that, we would not have made the required 24-hour notice guideline and would have had to pay the full amount for the dive. As it turned out, we only had to pay a 10% cancellation fee, which saved us about $275! Typically, things don’t work out like that for us (remember the incident in the customs line in Miami?), so we’re feeling lucky and will enjoy our extra sea day. We’ll just have to come back to Grand Turk another time!