Day 2 – Drake’s Passage and the Antarctic Convergence (6 Dec)

Couldn’t sleep past 04:30 hours. So much motion of the ship. It’s not making me ill, but I’m not very comfortable in my tiny upper bunk bed. Last night we had the biggest seas yet. There were 2 or 3 hours of very strong rolling – I was actually sliding up and down my bunk, my feet striking the starboard bulkhead, and then in the other direction, my head and pillow squooshing up against the interior wall of the cabin. It’s a bit frightening to look out into the dimness (it’s never completely dark) and see a flashing white of a breaking wavetop far above my porthole up here on deck 5 (the waterline is below deck 2), and then to feel the impact seconds later. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the swells were greater than 6 meters. I got up at about 05:00 and went down to read and write and drink tea. I had the bar to myself.

I thought I would be sick, and I thought I would be fearful, but I’m far from sick, and except for the occasional moment of anxiety (during 5+ meter swells, like last night) I’m not too worried. There are still lots of sick folks. As you walk the passage ways of the sleeping decks, occasionally you see the open doors of sea-sick passengers, allowing a little fresh air in. You catch sight of a droopy arm or a lolling head sticking out of the blankets. Sometimes the Prof. Molchanov feels like an infirmary or a hospital ward, and in fact the on-board MD has been dispensing various kinds of medicines. Some people haven’t been sighted out of their cabins since the hours after we embarked. As the sea improves, they are venturing out, choking down crackers and sipping at instant soup, their eyes glassy and their faces pallid and greasy. A curious joke dynamic developed between myself and the two younger women kayakers – one was quite ill, though she had a Scopalomine patch on. She decided to remove her patch, and started feeling better. Subsequently, these two women began a campaign to get me to take off my patch. Why? I don’t know, but at one point one of them was semi-jokingly threatening to rip it from behind my ear. It was at that moment that I realized I was going to have to knock them over the railing into the near-freezing Southern Ocean waters…

Looks like tomorrow we’ll have our first ship landings. Frode gave us kayakers a briefing in the afternoon. The five kayakers are: me, Pat, Kate, Phil and Sarah? All Anglophones, curiously. Phil is an older gentleman – a farmer from Australia. Patrick and Kate are younger, and also from Australia. Sarah is one of the youngest aboard the ship, and she hails from Cape Cod. As far as I can tell, she is the only other American aboard.

We have a couple more lectures today. Expedition leader Delphine talked about penguins. Finnish ice-man Tari talked about snow, physics, morphology, climate, albedo… Again I had all the questions. I think I’m coming across as a smart alec. But they don’t get down into the real science much in these lectures, so I end up wanting to hear a more. It’s as if you attended a seminar on some topic, but only got to hear the introductory 10 minutes and not the meat of the talk. Oh well. It’s aimed at a lay audience, and the staff is sensitive to the fact that many people can’t stay in the dining rooms for long because of the heat, lack of air, and rocking of the ship.

Today is Finnish independence day, and the Finns, in their separate dining chamber, drank vodka and sang Finnish national songs. Tari, one of the OceanWide staff, is Finnish, and the orientation meetings, lectures, announcements are done in both English and Finnish. Finish is the strangest language. There are these glottal stops and staccato endings to many words. I have a compulsion to mock it, because it sounds so funny to my ear…

At evening we are closing in on 61deg S, and about 70 nautical miles from the Shetlands. Unless the weather changes (it’s snowy and 20-30 knot winds now), we will reach the Islands around 3AM, with Zodiac and kayakers setting out shortly after 8AM. While I was figuring this out on the bridge, looking at the GPS coordinates and the nav maps, I noticed two penguins “porpoising” off the starboard side. I was amazed to see penguins 70 miles from any land or ice.

From our cabin, I observed the sunset, because the sun had fallen below the cloud cover. With a flat horizon and very good visibility, I thought I might observe the final seconds of the sunset to look for the “green flash” phenomena I’ve read about for years. I saw it perfectly!