At sea in the Pacific Ocean
Somewhere between Puerto Quetzal
And Acapulco
Good morning. The Mariner will be at sea all day. It is a little rough. The sea is rolling in with 6 to 8 foot swells, those alone wouldn’t be so bad, but the wind is really blowing, and apparently that is making it much worse. The sea bands, thank you Rochelle, seem to be doing their job. Still a little woozy but not sick.
Breakfast in the room this morning. There are two speaker series lectures this morning. The first was by Martin P. Lee. He could put a Meth head asleep from fifty paces. He is going to talk about the geology, geography and history of volcanos. It might seem a silly thing to talk about, but there are a lots of volcanos in Guatemala and Mexico. What are the Hawaiian Islands? Tops of volcanos. There was an alternative course at Boston University in geology, fifty-three years ago, which was interesting.
Dad always wanted me to study geology due to his investment and interest in geothermal energy. Using the hot water trapped below ground to generate electricity. It never got anywhere in the US but Iceland generates, as of 2020,799 megawatts (MW). Doesn’t sound like much but it is over a quarter of Iceland’s total electricity.
The United States, Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, and New Zealand were the top five geothermal power generation markets in 2021. Interestingly the United States generated a record 17,126.1 GWh in 2021. Up 1.1% from 2020. Indonesia ranked second with 15,889.5 GWh. Yes, I know what is a GWh? GWh is the abbreviation for Gigawatt hours. A GWh is a unit of energy representing one billion (1,000,000,000) watt hours and is equivalent to one million kilowatt hours.
The average home in the US in 2021 was 10,782 KWh. That means the US produced enough energy from geothermal to power nearly 1,500,000 homes. Oh, none of that was in his lecture, the lecture was really basic and not particularly interesting.
The next speaker, at 11 am, was Terry Bishop. He is a much better speaker, although I find his lectures a bit basic. He talked about Maximilian of Austria the last emperor of Mexico. A very tragic story of what a prince without a job does. He was the Austrian emperor of Mexico from 1864 until 1867. He was executed by President Benito Juarez.
Maximillian had a wonderful castle or villa outside of Trieste, Italy. It was part of the Austrian empire at the time. We visited it several years go. Miramare Castle is a beautiful villa on the Adriatic Sea.
After the lectures we took a short break and then we went down to the Compass Rose for lunch about 13:00. There weren’t very many people down there for lunch. They served a nice duck confit “spring” roll with hoisin sauce. Excellent! Then we had the lamb curry. It was ok, although I am sure Jayashree would have been upset for them even calling it Indian Lamb curry. Once the mango chutney was added it wasn’t do bad. Oh, I suspect I would get in trouble for that as well. Mary thought it was a little hot.
After lunch Mary went to listen to her book club book, and I went down to the Connnoisseur Club to have a cigar. When it had just gone 18:30 we went up to the Pool Bar and had a salad for dinner. Afterwards we headed in opposite directions again, the suite to listen to the book and the Connoisseur Club for cigars.
It was a nice day. Managed to weather the sea without getting ill. The Mariner will continue to course for Puerto Vallarta. Tomorrow there will be various tours of Puerto Vallarta, we will not participate.Been there before and weren’t at all impressed. Focus is on selling your tourist goods, and food. So, it will be a quiet day again tomorrow.
Buonanotte e Ciao, Enrico
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