Thursday, March 3, 2005: The Drake Passage

The waves are still rough when we awake in the morning, but not nearly as rough as last night. I go up to the Bridge, and find that in the middle of the night, the captain changed the course from North, to more of a Northwest. This enabled the ship to move more headlong into the winds and waves, reducing the side to side rocking, and making it more comfortable for sleeping. Nice Touch! Now, he has changed back to more of a due northerly course, and fortunately, the conditions don’t seem to be quite so bad.

We slept a lot during the morning. Joan is doing better with her patch in place, but still cannot do meals in the dining room. I bring back some food for her after each meal.

In the afternoon, there is an interesting panel discussion on the future of Antarctica… how the increased tourism can be handled without destroying the pristine nature of the continent. Then Jacques did a review of some newsworthy stories out of the South Ocean News. We also had a chance to review and order the video made by the Russian crew member on the Ioffe. It looks pretty good and we decide to buy it.

Mostly, this day was a day of travel, with limited activity and a fair amount of downtime, as we made our way north through the Drake Passage.

One of the things I enjoyed watching during this relatively uneventful day at sea was the birds that continued to follow the ship, comfortably flying along even though we were a hundred miles from any land. Sometimes the air would be filled with them, swooping and darting just above the waves, then up overhead. I tried to capture this in photos but ended up with a lot of pictures of ocean, sometimes with an occasional blur of a possible bird. The photos below were the best ones I got. Click on them to expand them -- you really cannot see any details on the birds, but it gives you an idea of their swooping behavior.