At sea

Date: 31st Dec, 2010

Sunrise: 4.50am

Woke up with Lynn's wake up call. It was a cold and cloudy morning and we were excited to try out our first breakfast on board. Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and I was quite impressed with the choices they provided which included mainly US style continental stuff. The crew managing the ship and the guides planning it were awesome. They have experience planning out every detail without overloading us with a lot of information. All in all they were very well organized and completely professional in making us feel at home on board.

We were given some tips to watch out for whales and dolphins in the open seas. We visited all the ship decks to check out the cool waters and it was drizzling on the decks. It was very windy and slippery. We even saw an old guy fall on the deck with a big camera hanging over his neck. Did not seem like a great day for taking pictures. Today was the day at sea heading north east towards Falkland Islands. We had a number of talks to attend including the mandatory briefings about zodiacs and IAATO regulations. The other informative talks were about the biology in the patagonian shelf and a brief history about Falklands.. We had almost full house attendance in these talks. In between the talks we had about an hour free time to checkout the birds from the ship deck or visit the bridge where the captain steers the ship. The bridge is an interesting place where we get to see all the actions of navigating the ship. You can see all the cool equipments, maps, lat/long data with a constantly changing TV monitor that indicates ship speed, wind speed, time, humidity, depth, temperature, etc.

The ship is quite stable but still rocks back-n-forth

Landing ashore can get us wet and we need special boots which we tried them on and set them aside in preparation for our upcoming visits to the shore. We had to vacuum all our outer layer clothes and waterproof bags to avoid introducing any invasive species into the pristine continent. All in all, the day was spent with preparations for the next day when we will have our first shore landing.

Today is new year's eve and as the custom says - it doesn't matter where you are in the world you have to raise a toast and welcome the new year in style. The theme for the new year's party was to get creative and wear a bow tie. The bar was decked up with lights and new year writings. Starting 22h we raised a toast with a countdown every half hour until midnight. All of us know how much fun it is to drink with the Australians and with our ship filled with so many of them it was a great way to welcome the new year with some noisy merrymaking. The staff were very cheerful and we had champagne flowing on the house. I have had great unique experiences welcoming the new year over the past few years and this one seemed to continue the tradition in the same style. Knowing that we had to wake up early (6am) for our first land sighting of Falklands we retired to bed at about 1.30am. Just 4.5hrs of sleep? Ouch! Are we on a vacation?

Though we thought it wasn't that great for taking pictures, it's hard at first to get used to the bouncing movement, we enjoyed our first day of wildlife watching on deck. Giant petrols would come flying along the ship, in it's beautiful flight and poise, for several times and we could see them very closely.

Link to photo album