A Perfect Day!

Well, it's been three days since our last post, and they have been busy! On Saturday, we met up with our group in the morning after breakfast and headed into Tierra del Fuego National Park. We did a bit of photography and some walking through the woods, but not too much of interest was seen. After a picnic lunch, we returned to Ushuaia where we had time to do some final shopping - for chocolates - and Greg did some final computer prep for the trip. From there, we took our buses for a very short drive onto the pier where we loaded onto our ship, the MV Ortelius. We are situated in cabin 528, on the fifth deck. It's a room with two twin beds and a private bathroom with a shower. All in all, it's a pretty good room, actually larger and with more storage space than we expected.

After a brief orientation and some time to quickly explore, we had a mandatory lifeboat drill. We all reported to deck, donned our life vests, and actually got into the covered life boats. It was pretty interesting actually, but with about 75 people per lifeboat, it's not a place we want to ever experience again!

We had dinner and departed Ushuaia around 6pm, sailing out of the Beagle Channel and into the Southern Ocean.

Sunday morning was cool and windy on deck. There were lots of birds flying around the boat. This was a day to be on board as we moved toward the Falkland Islands. The seas were quite calm and we did not have much in the way of seasickness. But Saturday night was a bit difficult for sleeping as we adjusted to the sound of the ship's motor and some strange sound coming from the sprinkler system in our room. Luckily we have earplugs that block most of that out!

During the day on Sunday, we spent time in various lectures - about photography, natural history, a mandatory presentation on how to behave in the zodiacs (the motorized rubber rafts that take us to the shore landings), lunch and dinner. We've met lots of people on board and are having fun seeing the variety of people here. 30 of the 95 passengers are "repeaters" - though I'm not sure if that means they've sailed this trip with the Cheesemans or just that they've been to the Antarctic before.

Monday started early with a wake-up call at 6:30, breakfast at 7 and the first zodiac departures at 8am. Today was a very long landing day - we spent about 11 hours in the field. We had absolutely perfect weather. I believe the temperature on shore was about 60 (it was 52 on deck at 6:30am) and we had varying winds - sometime it was windy, others not so much. We saw two significant penguin rookeries, along with nesting sites for black-browed albatross and some cormorants. The terrain is pretty barren, with steep cliffs at both sites we visited, separated by about a 4 mile walk. It was a good workout for sure. We took lots of pictures - about 900 or so between us - but as it's already 10:30pm we're going to upload one when we have more time in a couple of days. We have a 6:00am wakeup call tomorrow so for now we're off to sleep with visions of more penguins to come!