Sunday 1st January 2012 - Sailing en route from Ushuaia to Falkland Islands - Sunny, windy and cold outside

For my first night on a big ship, I was impressed with how much I slept.  I was more paranoid of falling out of the bed than anything else and the room was very hot so it took a while to get to sleep.  We had a ridiculously long wake up call at 0700 and breakfast started at 0730.  They still have a lot of logistics to figure out on this ship and breakfast service is one of them.  Luckily for me I was one of the first one down so I didn’t have to line up as long, but they only have a standard 2 slice toaster which is useless when 100 people want toast at the same time for breakfast, so they took the toaster away so there wasn’t a choice.  After breakfast the series of lectures for the day started.  The first one was on Natural History of the Falkland Islands with Doug.  This was followed up with a mandatory orientation session on the zodiacs and environmental protocol with all landings set up by the Antarctic Treaty.  This was then followed by a muck boot fitting.  Unfortunately, they didn’t have any small enough for me so I have boots two sizes too big and have to wear four pairs of socks to make them fit.  They are knee high at least so as long the water isn’t too high, I will have dry feet.

I went up to the bridge and watched some of the Albatrosses and Petrels that were flying alongside the ship.  Lunch was at 1230 and was Zucchini soup, salad and crepes.  It was quite nice.  After lunch it was back in the lecture room.  First up was Jim on Seabird ID 101 followed by photographer Tom on photographic composition.  We didn’t get all the way through that 

lecture so I am hoping it will be continued another day.  Then it was Rod with an introduction to the Falklands which was basically the same talk as the bird ID and photo workshop combined.  All the lectures went overtime so I missed the next one which was on seabird aerodynamics which was outside.  Finally we got some downtime (all of 30min) and then it was dinner.  Entrée was asparagus with sauce and what I assume was mushed up egg, I had fish for my main but it wasn’t very filling.  It had some weird horrible white stuff with it which had the consistency of perkins paste and tasted foul and someone said they thought it was flour mixed with water and butter.  It tasted like glug.  Desert was chocolate topped cake of some sort.  It was quite nice and I asked for seconds but they didn’t have any.  I hope they give us more food tomorrow because I am still hungry so goodness knows what it must be like for some of the bigger men.

After dinner, a Canadian guy asked me about the Larapinta Trail so it was back into work mode.  There was a doco showing on Caracas but I really didn’t feel like sitting in the lecture room for another couple of hours, so spent some time in the room instead.