P&O MV Arcadia; Sunday, 19 October, 2025

Without having to worry about getting down to Southampton in time for check-in we were able to have a bit of a lie in and a later breakfast in the hotel restaurant before a quick repack of bags, check that the P&O tags were all on correctly and then head down to catch our pre-booked Taxi over to the terminal.

The weather in Southampton was pretty abysmal this morning with very heavy rain meaning almost everyone was taking taxi’s to the various cruise terminals, with four ships all scheduled to depart in the afternoon and into the evening, so the waits for people without pre-booked taxis looked to be pretty long, though the taxi drivers were clearly appreciating the number of very short £10 fixed rate jobs they were able to knock out shuttling backwards and forwards from the hotels to the terminals.

We arrived at the terminal just as the clock ticked round to 11:45, our appointed earliest checking time, so we were able to check the bags into the system and then check ourselves in through the terminal. The process was all very well organized and pretty quick with our group being called forward to board the ship just after midday.

The rooms weren’t yet ready so, after checking in at our Muster Station, we headed up to the 9th floor and the buffet which was open for lunch. After lunch we wandered out onto the pool deck to sit out in what little period of dryness that there was for the day, before the announcement came just after 13:30 that our cabins were ready to head to.

Not long after getting into the cabin and having an explore of my home for the next seven nights the luggage arrived so I was able to unpack and get everything put away, before heading out for an explore of the ship to see where everything was, including locating all the open spaces, though it would still take me a couple of days before I found all the different spaces on the ship.

As we had balcony cabins we headed back there, opting to use mums as it was on the starboard side of the ship, to watch the sail away from Southampton, though by then the heavy rain had restarted and we mostly moved away into increasingly heavy rain and a dark murk from which only occasionally things would appear.

The murk lifted slightly just in time to head out on deck watch the start of the sail past the Isle of Wight with Osborne house and the lights of Ryde just about visible, but it was clear that the worst of the weather was starting to settle back in again so I quickly retreated back inside the ship.

Before dinner we headed down to the bar for a quick pre-dinner drink and to join the virtual queue for dinner, which took around 45 minutes to get through – something that would turn out to be pretty consistent the whole cruise.

It was also about this time that the captain made the announcement of the upcoming bad weather for our crossing of the Bay of Biscay. The Bay is a body of water that is notorious for the rough seas it can generate, caused by the rapid shallowing of the sea floor inside the bay. Waves that have travelled across the Atlantic causing almost no issues get forced higher and when they’re whipped up by the regular gale, storm and hurricane force winds, they can make any crossing an experience, and it looks like we were going to be experiencing some of the worst of it on the crossing with gale force 8 winds and wave heights in excess of 5m likely to make the next 36 hours or so ‘Interesting’

After dinner we headed back to our cabins and the world started to become significantly less level than it normally is.