Crossing the Antarctic Polar Front

Today we were on board the ship all day, continuing our journey to South Georgia Island. It takes nearly 3 days to get from the Falklands to South Georgia, and we expect to reach the northwest end of the island after breakfast. We may make a landing in the late afternoon / early evening, but it depends on weather and speed conditions between now and then.

The seas have been pretty calm I think - some wave action but nothing terribly extreme so far. We've been lucky to have no seasickness symptoms though some on board have, and others are on medication to fight it. Once we're around South Georgia, we will be traveling down the northeast coast of the island, which is in much more protected waters since there is a 9,000 foot mountain range that goes down the middle of the island. We have six full days of landings, not including whatever we do on Saturday. They say this is the Serengeti of Seabirds in terms of the sheer number of birds we can expect to see.

Earlier this afternoon (it's now 9:45pm), we crossed the Antarctic Polar Front. This is the region - it's about 60 miles wide - where the cold water from Antarctica meets the warmer water from the tropics. The water temperature drops, as does the air temperature. The air temp yesterday was about 36 degrees - certainly less balmy than the Falklands! The water temperature dropped from about 8-10 degrees Celsius to 0-2 degrees Celsius. Because of the mixing of the cold and warm water, there is an incredible amount of life in the water, meaning lots of food for the birds and seals that feed on it. It should be a good day for viewing birds and marine life from the ship tomorrow. Whales and dolphins have been spotted (but not by us just yet) and we're anxious to see more.

Today we attended a number of more lectures / slide shows. We just returned from a slide show the staff put together where every person on board ship is invited to share some of their images from the Falklands. There will be another similar show after South Georgia and again after Antarctica. It was interesting to see other peoples' images and gave us lots of ideas for the photography days ahead. We submitted the same images we posted yesterday.