Hello. My name is Emma and I go on cruises. Mostly, so far on P&O ships out of Southampton, but other perfectly good cruise companies are available. ;-) When I can, I con my parents into paying for my ticket.


When I travel, I blog. If you would like to read it all, it can be found at my PS. The Post have asked me to proffer some edited highlights of my ramblings, which I shall now inflict on you forthwith. Enjoy.

Thought it was about time I wrote a bit about it, what with there being so much of it about at the moment, and all... I haven't mentioned the colour recently. Partly because there's been so much else to mention, more "doing" stuff, so the "looking" stuff goes by the wayside, but partly because it's hard to keep up.

A while ago I mentioned that the sea was the colour of slate, dark grey with ripples of light grey running through it. On the way down from Japan to Australia, the colour was mostly a sort of blue-black. The colour you got when you were at school and changed your fountain pen from a black ink to blue.

The bright turquoise of the Suez Canal is a long-forgotten memory, although there have been greener days, such as when we were in Vietnam.

The shallower waters of Burnie were an amazing azure, moving to turquoise closer inland, but nowhere near as bright or vivid as the Suez. Not bad, mind you!

I bought a new camera in Osaka and I'm still playing with it. I have noticed, however, that the colours on the new camera are streets ahead of those perceived by my old one. If and when I upload some photos, or this piece is published in the Post, see if you can tell which pictures were taken with which camera.

At dinner, I asked my table about the sea outside our window. The sun had just set and the sky was starting to darken, so I asked how they would describe the colour of the sea. The answers I got were "midnight blue" and "pushing black" and I was informed that a combination of the two would make a perfectly understandable description of how the sea looked just then. So there you go.

The trouble with trying to talk about the sea is that it is never-ending. It is constantly changing, moving, shifting, changing colour, tint, hue, direction, affected by cloud cover, sunlight and brightness. We go up and down (quite a lot today!), side to side. We pass ships, land masses, oil rigs, tankers, tiny fishing boats, huge shoals of fish. We watch it rain miles away, and sometimes it rains on us. There is a lot more weather at sea than you might think!

And don't get me started on clouds or sunsets...

A Life on the Ocean Wave Archive

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