As I had been fearing the good plans did not work. We could not make up the 1.5 hours lost on departure Santo Tomas and starboard propeller shaft was still playing up. Thus in the course of the morning I had to cancel the call at Cozumel. Based on the ships speed, we would have arrived at 4 pm in the afternoon or even after, while having to leave again by 6pm. in order not to endanger the arrival time in Tampa. Although I have a lot of Tampa people on board, there is still a considerable number that has to fly and I can not jeopardize those flights, if I can help it.

Thus the company sent another letter with a compensation offer, we did an open bar on the Navigation deck and Lido deck in the late morning and the ship sailed on to Tampa. It is for us all on board very fustrating to have to deal with an issue we can not control. The engineers are trying very hard to resolve the issue, we were making progress and then there is a setback again during the night. My chief engineer is not a happy camper at the moment and is making long hours downstairs. We have the technicians on board to work on supplying more power to the shaft and I have high hopes that there will be a minimum impact on the next cruise. Luckily when we are island hopping, the distances are very short and the average speed to maintain quite low. Thus I am keeping my fingers crossed.

It is only an issue that affects us on higher speeds. The ship is safe and I can maneuver in and out every port and under every circumstance without a problem. I just can’t crank the ship up to warp speed at the moment.

I have no issues with handling situations like this, I just wish I did not have all the paperwork that goes with it. With the advent of the computer the thought was that there would be less paperwork to shuffle around but now instead we are shuffling electronic files around. It might take up less space in the cupboard with binders but it is still as time consuming.

The weather was great for part of the day, except in the afternoon, exactly around the time that we would have been at Cozumel. The Weather front from the Gulf came over with a lot of rain. As we were in open waters, I changed course and we could just skirt the rain clouds and only had a few drops on the deck. The next weather system, cold front, is supposed to leave the New Orleans area on Sunday and by that time we are docked in Tampa. So tomorrow should be a good day, sunny but maybe a bit windy.