Whales, dolphins and errm a naturist.

See, that caught your attention now didn't it? But before I get on to today's events. More on last night. We were invited to the obligatory Captain's welcome party. Sounds grand? It's not. It's a bit of a bun fight...or Champagne fight to be more precise and very little happens. The world and her husband get frocked up, join a long queue, smile sweetly to the senior bridge team, get a glass of pop and mingle. The Captain has some words and everyone trots off again.

There were two "sittings" for the Champagne reception and we missed both of them. The thought of being flounced up in time for the 6pm session was entirely off the cards and then the 8pm session was going to interfere with dinner. We heard afterwards there were massive queues. The things we Brits will do for a freebie.

I wore my favourite pink, flowery party frock, which always gets comments and Nick went full penguin. Here I am!

It does add a sense of occasion and in that respect is lovely, however, there are a lot of Celebration nights on our 65 day trip, which concerns me that said sense of occasion may become run of the mill. We'll see.

This morning it was great to wake up to dry land. We've arrived in Tenerife. A little on the cloudy side but a very acceptable 21 degrees. So what did we do? Yes, of course we did, we got off one boat and got onto another. I do sometimes question my wisdom, or was it Nick's?

We were coached from the north of the island, Santa Cruz, to the bottom of the island, Playa de las Americas. All I can say about the latter was I was mighty pleased I wasn't holidaying there. We joined a massive catamaran with about 100 people on board. Our guide spoke Spanish, English, German, Italian, Dutch and French, all fluently and with massive gusto.

It didn't take long before we started seeing fins sticking out of the water and our first whales were spotted. I realised at this point that perhaps I should have asked some specific questions relating to the types of whales we were going to encounter. I had visions of majestic beasts emerging out of the water only to smack down in front of us. Awestruck and gasping (us, not them). Nope, we saw a few pilot whales, which if you're not familiar with are about the size of your average dolphin.

Once I got my head around the fact I wasn't going to see a blue whale, I settled into watching these rather docile creatures. Once our guide felt we had been 'whaled' out, we went in search of a place for folks to take a dip. We were lucky enough to see a small pod of dolphins swimming fairly close to shore too.

We anchored up and the braver ones took a dip, while the less brave ones enjoyed the free bar. It was at this point when a random bloke decided he'd had enough of his swim, got out and proceeded to do his exercises. Push-ups and star-jumps. Ermmm, all with nothing on. Occasionally, someone might walk past him on the shore side and he'd stop doing his exercises to have a little chat.

Eventually, we were saved by our guide bringing everyone back on board and we ambled back to the marina.

So far, we have felt quite lucky that the ship hasn't been at capacity. That will now change as of today. Remember the Yellow Fever saga? It would appear there are several hundred passengers who didn't receive the one essential mail relating to being Yellow Fever vaccinated and they were not permitted boarding at Southampton. 

Those people had their luggage taken from them at Southampton and were told to join the ship in Tenerife when they were fully vaccinated. That's a drama I'm seriously pleased we didn't have to negotiate. And finally, here I am as I am writing this blog!