Peter I Island to the Ross Sea - at sea......

Day 10 – the first of several days "at sea". Yes, yes, I know we're at sea for the whole month but this means we're really really at sea, won't be seeing any land, won't be stopping anywhere, zero chance of stepping off the ship. First we travel through the Bellingshausen Sea, named after a Russian who was one of the first to spot Antarctica back in around 1820. Then through the Amundsen Sea, named of course after the great Roald Amundsen of first to the South Pole fame. And finally to the Ross Sea, named after the man who first explored this area in arounnd 1840. The Ross Sea is where all the exciting stuff will, hopefully, happen and where there's lots and lots of interesting things to see. In the meantime, life at sea.....

Well much like back in the Drake Passage, on the first couple of days of the trip, it turns out that long boring days at sea are actually so busy you're in danger of not having time for your siesta if you're not careful. First a coffee in bed and a quick peek out the window to see what the day's like. Then breakfast which can last a varying length of time depending on how interesting your table companions are, then barely time to draw breath before the 11am lecture, that brings you up to lunch, then try to squeeze in a nap before the afternoon lecture, then sometimes a second afternoon lecture (!!!) which takes you right up to pre-dinner drinks, then dinner, then sometimes an after-dinner event and then bed before doing it all again. Exhausting.

Squeezing in a quick read.

Somewhere in there I've managed to finished reading Scott's diaries (spoiler alert - they all die in the end) and have started on Peter Fitzsimons' (no relation) book about Mawson, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen which is promising to be very interesting and includes all the gossip and bitter back-biting that one tends to omit from one's diary when one is planning to publish. It's lovely to see that great men who achieve great things are just as petty as the rest of us.

Karl may have had his ultimate moment of the trip already. He was sitting alone on the bow contemplating life when a pod of orcas appeared just ahead and he got to hang over the bow and enjoy them all by himself for a while until the announcement went out aboard "orcas!" and he was joined by the telephoto lens brigade, machine-gunning the silence. I knew nothing about orcas 'til we had a lecture – they are fascinating creatures. They are a matriarchal society living in pods led by the eldest female. When pods come across each other they take the opportunity to mate with others outside their own pod but then remain with their own pod, the young being raised by their mothers, maternal aunts and uncles and grandmother/great-aunts etc.. They are very long-lived animals. Girls reach sexual maturity around age 10, boys around age 15, pregnancy lasts around 18 months, bubs are weaned at around 3 years and so females reproduce only about once every five years. And really interestingly females have a menopause at around age 40, just like humans! But they live to be between 80 and 100 years old (the menfolk dying off in their 60s), sticking around to provide some sort of survival advantage to the group by their growing wisdom. The young learn vocalisations and hunting behaviour by being taught (rather than by instinct) and dialects vary between pods, so that you could say they even have a "culture" that's passed through generations. We saw some amazing video of orcas' complex and cooperative hunting behaviour: swimming past in a line, flicking their tails at just the right time to make a wave that knocks their prey off their little lumps of ice. Orcas are brilliant, Google them.

Day 12 How else to pass the time? Karl Haircut Day! Position chair in shower, position Karl in chair, wedge self in shower behind chair and start chopping. His ears were definitely in more danger than on dry land but I must say I was quite pleased with the overall effect.

I seem to have developed a serious Cosmopolitan (the cocktail) habit. It's just the perfect pre-dinner drink. Before every dinner. We also seemed to have claimed seats at the bar for pre-dinner drinks– the best ones by the window – and on the one day that the flu stopped us getting there our absence was noted by our lovely bartender who was asking after our welfare the next evening.

Recently we've been seeing the most enormous, ENORMOUS, icebergs. Ice islands really, vast, flat bergs with high ice-cliffs around the "coast".

this is kilometres long. And very high.

And today we woke to falling snow and white decks! Why does snow always make it feel like a holiday? 

Day 13 The staff have decided we need movie nights to keep us out of trouble and the premiere tonight was James Bond with Sean Connery. We've had the same idea but are having our own private movie nights. One guy came prepared with lots of films on his hard drive which has been being passed around from cabin to cabin and so I think there are several couples having private movie nights. We have also finally conceded that wine cask number 1 is undrinkable and it's time to try cask number 2. Fingers crossed.

Day 14 Thursday evening is Happy Hour Cocktail evening! Tonight's theme is "blue" (as in curacao) so Karl had a Blugherita and I tried a Blutini while my fellow Cosmopolitan addict gave the Bluesmopolitan a whirl. All judged to have hit the spot very nicely thank you.

the Blutini on the window beside "our" seats at the bar. With a view!

I've realised, during movie nights when Karl insists on closing all the blinds to achieve the dark cinema atmosphere, that I may have developed a fear of the dark. It seemed really, really weird to be in a completely dark room and then I started thinking about what it will be like when the sun eventually sets again and EVERYWHERE goes completely dark! It's terrifying......black darkness everywhere...pass the Valium.

Day 15 I've decided to end the self-imposed confinement prompted by my flu and went outside for the first time in a week. It was quite successful, I didn't die. Also decided to try to get some exercise by doing laps of the deck. Turns out this is an awfully small ship and you can do an awfully large amount of laps in 20 minutes. Almost, but not quite, to the point of getting dizzy. There were a few other lappers as well so I wasn't the only crazy-looking individual. Actually really enjoyed the lovely crisp, bracing air.

Me going in circles.

This turned out to be a good exercise option - Karl tried the "running up and down the four flights of stairs repeatedly" option which went very well, and attracted much interest from fellow passengers keen to do the same, until one day an announcement stated "please do not run in the corridors" which (as well as making us feel like we were back in school) Karl took to mean he was being warned off.

The views are still entertaining: ice, ice, penguin!, ice, ice, seal!, ice, ice, bird!, ice, ice, penguin! etc.. Saw a great group of four Adelie penguins today on an ice floe, as the boat was approaching they waddled across the ice and decided it was best to escape into the water, plop, plop, plop, and swim off, plop, plop, plop (they swim like dolphins popping in and out of the water) and then zoom out, whooosh (they do a great vertical rocket launch from the sea and land, da-dah!, upright and running) onto another ice floe a little further away. And when we got close to that piece of ice they repeated the process. And again. And just when I was thinking that these were the most stupid animals on the face of the planet I realised, maybe they weren't trying to get away from us, maybe they had decided to come along for the ride! So they may be incredibly stupid or incredibly bored and in need of entertainment.

"Come on lads, this way".

Wheeee!!!

A snow petrel, aren't they beautiful?

Day 16 Awoke to a sunny morning and land ahoy! Well, lots of ice and snow and ice-cliffs that allegedly have land underneath. Chinese New Year and our Chinese group of passengers kindly treated everyone to a glass of sparkling rose on the way into dinner and their very good cheer was a little contagious. No Chinese food however, unlike the very interesting version of lamingtons (actually "lemingtons") that we got for dessert on Australia Day.

Day 17 A good day and a bad day. We got to the Ross Ice Shelf which is an amazing shelf of ice, attached to the land but floating out into the sea ending in huge ice cliffs. And it just goes on and on and on. It's about the size of France. That's quite big. We sailed by it for a couple of days and those ice-cliffs just kept going and going.

The ice shelf

And the bad news, a passenger had a medical emergency so instead of hanging out in the Bay of Whales admiring the ice shelf we had to head straight for Ross Island so she could be flown to the McMurdo research base and then evacuated to Christchurch. Lucky timing for her and barely disrupted our schedule at all – when they first started to tell us what happened I thought (yes, I am that self-centred) "oh no, we'll have to just head straight back to New Zealand without getting to see all the really cool stuff, the universe really doesn't want us to see Antarctica for some reason". So I was very relieved. And the patient was recovering well by the time she was dropped off.

So we still get to stay here and see all the really interesting stuff!