It is our second and last day crossing from South Georgia to the Falklands and we are experiencing ‘holiday’ weather… the sea is gentle and the sky is mostly blue! There are some birds about, from gigantic wandering albatrosses to diminutive diving petrels. At one point the bird-watch gang become particularly excited with a fly-by from a cattle egret and the radios began to crackle. For some, a cattle egret hundreds of miles from land in the South Atlantic is as unexpected as a UFO, but cattle egrets are well known for their vagabond ways and seeing it is much better than just reading about it.
So, what to do with a near perfect day at sea, as binoculars get heavy after a few hours of use? There are lectures and photo workshops sprinkled throughout the morning and afternoon. New things to learn, skills to master… level up! There is also the never-ending process of editing too many images. “Must be more ruthless, I have 372.4 gigabytes of images on my internal hard drive and my computer now makes a snail seem zippy”. In this case meals can become a welcome and delicious respite from concentrated ‘alone time’.
While not quite Pavlov’s dog, we are now comfortable with three meals a day, teatime snacks and cocktail-hour hors d'oeuvre. I begin feeling peckish within an hour of each event, ultimately forced to abandon my image editing and driven into a world of conversation and gastronomical pleasure. “Ah, there is pizza on the lunch menu, simple but fun!” What else can be done with ‘meal time’? Well how about some adventure and education?
With the fine weather and sea conditions the hotel department has transformed the laundry into a party. Deep in one of the ‘Crew Only’ areas of the ship, the folding table has become a canapé table and the bonded storage room has become a coffee and tea serving area with the added feature of a little something ‘extra’ for the coffee if you so wish. So that is the adventure part, the education includes meeting and chatting with the laundry men, the provision master, the chefs (head chef Mathijs is in the photo) and special guest star Apollo, chief of our waste management. Apollo is hosting visitors to his sparkling clean waste room: blocks of compressed boxes and cans, ground up glass and many other intriguing collections, anything that can be separated is in its own area. This pedagogic orgy continues after dinner with informal talks by the Captain, chief engineer and hotel manager about their departments and what they do. A full day indeed!
