Sunshine, Buck's Fizz and weird technology

There are times when you meet a celebrity that you suddenly realise how often they have featured in your life over the years. This was very much true of Cheryl Baker who was a guest speaker on the cruise. You'll recall her as one of the foursome, Buck's Fizz, who made their name by winning Eurovision with "Making Your Mind Up" and were then tragically in the news when their coach was involved in a serious accident.

Yet, she was was much more than this. A regular presenter and guest on many TV shows - most notably Record-breakers with Roy Castle for eight years. She sang, cooked, ice-skated (disastrous from her point of view) and charmed audiences for many years. At 69 she is still easily recognisable and still a massive stage presence. Her presentation - split into two parts when her tech didn't work earlier in the cruise - was vibrant and funny and the theatre was packed, despite strong sunshine outside. Quite a delight.

My God! We shall never complain again about slow Internet. Tech does strange things on the high seas and not least, satellite Internet. You can't trail a fibre optic cable behind the boat to connect to BT so the signals bounce around in the sky off satellites. Tie this in with uncertain coverage from Wifi repeaters around the ship and you have a recipe for standing on one foot and waving your phone, tablet or laptop in the air in order to coax a signal into the system - all at huge expense, by the way. 

However, the weird issue I wanted to point out was to do with exercise monitoring on Apple Watch. We take a regular 2-2.5 mile walk every day around the promenade deck. We set our Watches monitoring what we are doing so we can see how far we have walked, how fast, how many calories burned and heart rate. All fine so far until, after the third lap of the boat, which represents about a mile, the Watch is saying that you have done nearer five miles! Bizarre - putting my wee brain to considering why this might be, I came to the conclusion that the clever technology measures how far you have walked, not by your number of steps and the length of your stride, but by geo-location. While we strode away, the ship is happily chugging along, eating up the (nautical) miles, thereby distorting the reading.

Even stranger, we did the same thing while docked yesterday and the exact opposite happened ... because effectively as far as the Watch was concerned, we didn't go anywhere - just round and round in the same spot. There must be a fix for ocean-going fitness freaks such as ourselves, surely?

And finally, we have received the draft copy of our Order of Service for our Renewal of Vows - oo-er, gulp, bit serious. Really lovely and we are getting excited for the event which is less than a fortnight way. If any readers can make it on the 24th, feel free to helicopter in and we can guarantee a glass of champagne!

And progress? We've slowed right down on our next leg towards Mindelo, Cape Verde. 12 knots average and up to midday we had covered 240 nautical miles. We are currently (18:45) somewhere off West Africa - however, the ship doesn't appear to have updated its position for 11 hours. Try Vesselfinder.com and use the ship's number (9169524) in the search box for more updated information. Our map will no doubt catch up soon!