When we went to bed last night, the plan was for people to take Zodiacs right after breakfast and go to Serrurier Island Nature Reserve for walking, beach snorkeling, and general enjoyment, followed by lunch and lectures. We got up early, had breakfast, and changed into our swim gear – just in time to hear a PA announcement saying that the conditions were unfavorable for safe embarkation and disembarkation, so we’d be sailing an hour or so to another of the Murion Islands to go snorkeling there and to hang tight. So we went up to the lounge and talked to people for an hour and a half.
The PA sounded again: plan B wasn’t going to work, so they were going to move Meg Urry’s lecture on “Einstein, General Relativity, the Eclipse of 1919, and Black Holes” up to 11:30, to be followed by lunch and further information…but conditions didn’t look great.
Meg’s lecture was great, and we were lucky enough to have lunch with her. We were sufficiently discouraged about snorkeling to decide to have wine with our lunches; that was a mistake (though it was good wine!) because plan C was going to work – we’d sailed to the other side of Serrurier Island and it was safe to bring us ashore.
We joined the queue for the Zodiacs and spent about an hour and a half walking the beach on Serrurier Island. There were shells and birds to see, and it was nice to be able to walk farther than a few hundred feet without having to turn around!
