Days 3-4: Melbourne

We spent Christmas Day 2007 at sea between Sydney and Melbourne. This was our "roughest" day on the ship. Zack says it was smooth, but other passengers on the ship were complaining about the rocky ride. Really, it wasn't so bad. Days at sea are a great excuse to do very little, so we spent most of the day reading and relaxing, though we did participate in a Merengue class.
Our ship, the Mercury, was very nice. There were about 2200 passengers and 1000 crew, which seems like a lot when you hear the number, yet by the end of the trip we recognized quite a few faces. The ship had enough pools, jacuzis and restaurants to keep most of the passengers busy in them for most of the day. In addition, they had several night clubs, a coffee shop, a mini-mall, and an internet cafe, as well as a movie theater and a stage theater. Yet, when left with time to explore all these options, we tended to choose to spend most of our time with a book near a pool or sleeping. This only proves that no matter how cool the vacation, it is important to schedule time for doing nothing.
On Boxing Day (the day after Christmas), we arrived in Melbourne. Zack and I signed up for a snorkeling trip that lasted the whole day, so we didn't so much go to Melbourne as through it. A bus took us out of the city and up the coast to a little town called Portsea that is home to a small colony of creatures called weedy seadragons. (Yes, the weedy part is actually a part of the name.) Zack and I had seen a few of these guys at the aquarium in Sydney, so we knew essentially what we were looking for. They look like seahorses, only longer and with leaves sticking out of them. If we hadn't seen them at the aquarium, I'm not sure I could have found one snorkeling because they live in kelp beds, so they really blend in.
The snorkeling guides split us into two groups and sent half of us to a nearby town, Sorrento, to check out the shops while the other half snorkeled. When we arrived back, they fed us lunch and got us into our wetsuits (making us wonder just how cold the water really would be) and walked us across the street to the beach. We literally walked straight into the water (which was actually quite a nice temperature), and right there near the shore were several beds of seaweed in which were hidden all kinds of nifty sea animals. We saw a few very colorful fish, a starfish, a school of pufferfish, and even a few of the elusive weedy seadragons in their natural habitat. After an hour of tooling around in the water, we were returned to our bus which took us back to the ship with just enough time to wash up before we set sail again, this time for Tasmania...
Unfortunately, snorkeling and digital cameras don't really mix, so we don't have many pictures from the Melbourne area, but here are a few of the skyline from the ship: