Mist, or the thing that keeps you from seeing anything farther away than your hand, and a few random musings.

You’re sitting in the lounge looking out at the horizon through the floor to ceiling wall to wall windows. Or maybe you’re just looking at that weird-winged bird that probably isn’t an albatross. And then you make a mistake. You innocently take a sip of your tea. And when you look up again, the bird, the horizon, and even half the ship is gone.
Gray-white mist as far as you can… well, can’t, see. And it seems to happen in an instant. I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe the ocean just then is a bit warmer or the air is a bit colder, or maybe a cloud expanded vertically. So you strain your eyes a while and after another sip or two the horizon reappears and you can see whales or birds to your hearts content. Provided the wildlife cooperates, of course, which they usually don’t.
One of the passengers I’ve seen taking photos, a sweet young woman from Hong Kong, came in yesterday with an awesome photograph of the tail flukes of a humpback whale. I missed it, probably while refilling my cup. All I have to show for my whale watching is a tiny dorsal fin that might belong to a Minke whale. The jury is still out, as the photo looks a bit… foggy.

She chose the humpback photograph to paint in our watercolor class. During our at-sea days, for example the two days spent travelling from the Antarctic Peninsula to South Georgia, our resident photographer has been showing us how to paint watercolors of our best photographs. I chose a Gentoo penguin which ended up looking like Donald Duck,

and later, I tried painting the misty rocks at the opening into Deception Island’s harbor. That worked out a little better as a guy actually recognized that I’d painted rocks.

The sea is strange. We’re moving across it at the unusually fast speed of 13-14 knots because the weather is so good and there are almost no big waves impeding our forward progress. But then every once in a while there will be a few minutes of swells that stagger you from one side of the hallway to the other as you walk drunkenly towards your room. Then a few minutes later all is well and you can pass a sobriety test. Where these rollers come from, and why they travel in a little grouping and then vanish, I have no clue.
Another strange thing, we have seen no other ships for over a week. We have seen no airplanes, not even a contrail, since leaving Ushuaia, Argentina on the first day of the cruise. We’re travelling around with our own little society of 237 passengers and a few more as crew.
We’ve met a few people, though. Two of the stations we visited in Antarctica were manned, or womaned. One was an Argentinian research station, Base Brown, in Paradise Harbour, a gorgeous place of blue skies, black mountains spotted with pristine glaciers and misty crowns that reflected in dark blue water speckled with strangely shaped blocks of ice.

One fun thing here was watching and actually photographing an avalanche across from the station. Too bad I didn’t think of filming it…

Our crew brought the researchers a box of greens and fresh fruit as thanks for allowing us to look at their Gentoo penguins and seals. The tourist ships that stop by on a regular basis bring or take away mail, supplies and break the monotony of the isolated researchers.
At Port Lockeroy, a British research station, a few women operated a little museum and gift shop and the “farthest south” post office where you could mail post cards from Antarctica.

Of course, our ship is still carrying that sack of mail and it will arrive at the mainland when we do. Those researchers were “paid” by our staff by being allowed to shower onboard the ship. The proceeds from their gift shop go towards maintaining the base and their research, as the UK is supposedly stingy with their grants. They study two groups of Gentoo penguins, one allowed contact with humans versus the other group on the other side of the base that are not allowed contact with humans. I saw no fence…

Well, I’m off to bed. Tomorrow will come fast since wakeup time is 5 AM when the sun rises. Our speed has been tweaked so we arrive at the south-eastern edge of South Georgia exactly at sunrise so we can spend the 3-4 hours sailing towards Grytviken watching for birds and whales in a krill-rich area.
I really hope the mist clears. I don’t want to be the only one without a watercolor of humpback flukes.