Antarctica to Zimbabwe – Day 37 – Silver Wind, Puerto Williams can be found here.
It’s briefing and biosecurity day! Everyone’s least favourite part of a remote expedition cruise – but both are important, so we shant complain (too much).
The good news is that – this being our second leg – we get to skip most of the mandatory biosecurity and zodiac briefings.
The bad news is that the meet-the-crew and voyage overview portions start at 9 am sharp, which is why we’re waking before 8 am.
The early bird gets the berries:
We savour these strawberries while we have them, as we know that they will not keep for the rest of our 23 day journey.
Sadly, we are too late for my daughter and wife to get their second courses – hard boiled eggs and poached eggs and avocado on a bagel, respectively. They wait 20 minutes, but then the clock runs out and they head to the briefing instead.
It’s just one of those little setbacks that happens during any trip. It takes time needed for any team to coalesce and this may be impacting the situation in the kitchen. And 20 minutes is not an unreasonable amount of time to wait for a hot breakfast – particularly one that involves hard boiled eggs!
We’ll try again another day, and we will leave the kitchen more time on our next attempt.
Off to the meet-the-crew and destination brief. Most of the crew is carrying on before, but we’re glad to put names to the new faces.
And to welcome the return of some of our favourite guides
Jamie will be taking over as expedition leader this leg. Marieke remains senior to him, but will be mostly working out of the office. It seems like there is some training planned for this voyage – one of the expedition guides lists training as her role.
There’s also an artist! Yvonne will be painting and sketching at some of the landing sites. I’m hoping to take in some of her workshops with the kids. (I’d also love to take in some more of Jess’s writing workshops, though understandably I expect she will be running the same workshops again for the new guests.)
On to the destination briefing. There wasn’t quite as much information as I’d hoped regarding Tristan d’Cunha, Nightingale or Gough Island but I understand the team’s desire not to overwhelm the passengers with information. We instead focus on Falklands.
Also, there will be a lunar eclipse tonight that we might able to spot, and it sounds like we may be taking another crack at iceberg A23a. There were also some offhand comments that made us suspect that we might attempt landings on the southern / western coast of South Georgia. More to follow!
No guarantees regarding the lunar eclipse. “Eclipse forecasting is a dark art,” as Jamie quips.
Off to get some homework done, and to start in on our newfound goal of 10,000 steps per day. We’ve set the kids up with their favourite podcasts, so there were much fewer complaints this time around. It was a nice day and swells weren’t too bad, but we still broke it into two blocks to make it a little less monotonous.
Then to lunch! My wife had the beef shortribs:
And I had the chicken burger off the children’s menu (best said in a dry South African accent to mimic our server’s quizzical tone).
If our server thinks I will be shamed that easily, he is sorely mistaken!
We still had some time before bio-security, so I take the kids up to Panorama for some Dungeons & Dragons. They continue to explore the town of Vallaki in the hopes of finding a safe spot for Iryna to hide from the vampire Strahd, but are beginning to realize that the Burgomaster’s (mayor’s) cheery festivals have sinister undertones.
Then off to bio-security – no issues with the cleanliness of our garments, but it’s good to give them another pass before we once more arrive in South Georgia. My hiking shoes are particularly vile after the Cerro Bandera hike, so I take the opportunity to give them a good clean. Here’s hoping they dry in time for the West Point hike!
A little bit more time for reading and homework, and then we let the kids have a bit of screen time. After deliberately not bringing our Nintendo Switch we have decided to set up Fortnite on our son’s laptop so that he can play with his friends back home. He managed to take second place in his first round!
The swells begin to intensify – hitting around the three-and-a-half metre mark – so we head a bit lower in the ship to limit the sense of movement. (We mostly have our sea legs at this point, but the Bonine, children’s Gravol and concentrated ginger are all playing their role.) The motion is much reduced in Dolce Vita, so my son and I hang out there for a while.
But I do duck out to take in the final portion of Jon’s Falkland Islands – Discover to Dispute lecture. I’d missed the portion regarding the war itself last time due a conflict with trivia, so I’m glad to hear the rest of it. It’s a polished, entertaining lecture – highly recommended.
Back to our suites to change for dinner. We briefly debate attending the Captain’s welcome cocktail party, but opt to head to an early dinner at La Terrazza instead.
New menu tonight!
I have the penne with pancetta:
While my wife and kids both have the tenderloin, parts of which I steal from the children. (Not pictured.)
I manage to catch the sunset off of Panorama:
But the day isn’t done yet! First round of trivia will be held super late at 9:30 pm, and we have promised our son that he can attend if he wishes to do so (and he wishes to do so). So we attend trivia, and are very pleasantly surprised when the whole team arrives!
We place a very respectable third in themed trivia – with the usual categories of famous faces, airport codes, and flags of the world. The winning team has Igor on their side, which really isn’t fair – which is why we promplty recruit Igor for our team tomorrow.
At the tail end of trivia, Jamie comes on the intercom to inform us that the ship will indeed be in path of the lunar eclipse this evening and so anyone who wishes to observe is welcome to wake at 3 am and do so. (No announcement will be made, for understandable reasons.)
It sounds like a wonderful opportunity, but it’s not for us. Not tonight. We are Zodiac Group 1, as the Pole-to-Polers before us – first into the breach, and an early morning awaits.
But I am able to get a proper ‘moonshot’ in lieu of a eclipse photo late tonight:
Continue reading Antarctica to Zimbabwe – Day 39 – Silver Wind, Falkland Islands.