more mild than wild

Friday 9th March 2007

1:02 p.m. CET Wednesday night and last night took on a rather similar format, they started off well but the number of people in the bar gradually declined throughout the evening and by the end there were only a few couples and groups left. Wednesday night I rounded off by playing just instrumentals, but last night I managed to get a bit more audience participation, and I played a string of requests including the jazz standard Autumn Leaves, and a rather flamboyant rendition of the main theme from Phantom Of The Opera which I sang for the first time, which both went down very well.

Again last night felt more like a weekend, and in fact we had more passengers on last night than are due to be on tonight, which is unusual as Thursday is often one of the quietest nights of the week. Having said that, a good proportion of the passengers yesterday were school groups.

When we were leaving the harbour in Zeebrugge on Wednesday evening I noticed that it was still a bit light. Also when I have been on deck the last couple of times on our outward crossings, I noticed that we seemed to be a lot closer to the shore than I can remember seeing before, both on this ship and the York; so much so that it was possible to make out each of the roads from the street-lights.

Yesterday afternoon the weather was quite good so I took a walk down the side of the river, and ended up walking as far as The Deep (which I would guess is about a mile away) and back. Saw a few interesting features along the way, including a derilict pier a little way down from the ferry port (which houses what looks like a the remains of a warehouse and a disused railway siding), and a couple of wrecks a bit further down at Victoria Dock. I took some pictures which I have uploaded to my web-space as per usual. Here are a couple of them.

Saturday 10th March 2007

2:06 p.m. Last night went well, the bar was busy for most of the evening, and I even had a few people singing along to some of the songs including Moon River and Annie’s Song. Apart from that it was a fairly unremarkable night but nevertheless a good one.

It rained heavily yesterday morning in Zeebrugge but in the afternoon it cleared up so I took a walk down to the beach for an hour. It will still quite blustery though and I watched some people wind-surfing.

The weather is fairly mild and sunny today too, and with less wind, hopefully it will stay that way for the next couple of days as Ida is on-board for a round trip.