After transiting north for the last couple of days, today was the day the ship was due to turn westward to go around the tip of Cape York.
The weather in VFNQ (very far north Queensland) was delightful, however the sun up here really does have some bite and I like several other passengers have received a little bit of sun…

While we didn’t really see the tip of the continent, we did spend most of the day making our way through the Torres Strait, past Thursday Island and onwards past Boobie Island .
Once we had made it through the Strait it was time to say farewell to our pilot. Having the pilot leave the ship is always an exciting thing. I mean where else can you watch a guy climb between two moving objects (in this case a very large ship and a not as large boat) while both are hurtling along at several knots, include a little bit of swell and it’s as if we were watching a real life James Bond movie.

 Judging from the map on the TV, we should be getting close to Indonesian waters sometime tomorrow.
Tonight we have our first time change, we got back to our rooms to find our bedtime chocolate sitting on a time change reminder card. I wonder how many people will turn up to breakfast tomorrow morning an hour early!

As we leave for dinner, the TV is letting us know that we are 2375km away from Singapore. Bearing in mind we’ve already done 3028km, that’s over halfway.
Fun fact:
One of the trivia questions that our team had no idea about was ‘who or what is Piper Alpha?’ While we were thinking it was some military term, it is in fact an oil rig. Who would have known.