Woke up this morning to blue sky, sunshine and calm sea, what a relief.

The surprise news yesterday was that we are not going to Tenerife tomorrow, instead we are now going to Madeira. It seems like a magical mystery tour, all down to the bad weather though. The captain gave a very good presentation last night showing weather charts over the past few days. We came through very rough seas (9 to 10m waves) and strong gale force conditions, although apparently nothing like those we would have experienced if we had gone to the Azores as planned.

He explained some technical details of how they navigate through stormy seas maintaining the ships orientation relative to approaching waves to minimise the extent to which we were being tossed around. This has delayed our progress and as Madeira is closer we are making straight for that island. This change means we will visit all the places originally scheduled but in a slightly different order. 

We recruited a new member into our quiz team last night. She's a Dr of Philosophy and lectured in English Literature for 30 years so quite a useful member. We still only managed 9 out of 15 though.

I've walked 3 times around the deck this morning (3.5 times equals a mile so I'll do some more). No whales or dolphins yet. A talk this afternoon is by Jeremy Ensor, musician, tour manager and producer, telling us about his life in the music business, but now a bit more fresh air and whale spotting.