With 3 days at sea, it’s time to settle into life on board the ship. We have quite an itinerary which mainly involves eating. I forget what it’s like to be hungry and I’m starting to feel like a plump penguin baby. This morning we had to hoover our clothes again due to bio contaminants between Antarctica and South Georgia. Then a lecture on the Belgica which was fascinating. It was the first trip by Roald Amundsen when he was 25. It was captained by Gerlache, who named the Gerlache Strait we travelled through yesterday. I sat listening to the lecture and was thinking about how bizarre it is that we are on this ship. It’s much quicker, we don’t have to do any work, it’s powered by fuel, everyone has a shower in their room, we have plenty of fresh food, We sit in the hot tub, we have a sauna, we have a ship pianist and photographer, we have lectures every day, no dogs on the deck, getting wet constantly and storms must have been horrendous.
Morning coffee and another lecture, this time on king penguins. They have an 80-90% divorce rate and unlike other penguins, they can have more than one egg if one gets damaged. The penguins are fascinating, with their jumping using both feet and eating snow to cool down. Time for lunch, we weren’t hungry again but eating filled some time at sea.
Our clocks go forward one hour today, which feels bizarre, we are only 2 hours behind GMT. Then if you look at the map we are not that far from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The mind boggles. It’s so easy to get stuck into sleeping most of the day but this time I was determined to not nap. Instead we went to the gym, went to another lecture on ice and glaciers, then I did speed walking circuits of the ship watching Wandering Albatross, Brown browed albatross and giant petrels. Another lecture on geology, hot tub and then….eating again.
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