Rolling under engines heading south exerting the 60s latitudes.
Still on the Drake Passage, light variable winds. We can't say we are having a boring Drake Passage.
It is not that it hasn’t been a bit rough, calmer too, windy, squalls passed by, or we progressed just under a gentle breeze. It is that, in just a couple of days, we had it all. Including the many sail handling, setting and dousing canvas, and even a sail replacement. Several manoeuvres such as Wearing Ship, or times like today when we motor for half of the journey without any sail set, or we motorsail during the late evening and night.
Weather, we've also got for every liking, cloudy and grey, rain, passing sleet and snow showers and even sunshine.
Like that, we have sailed across the latitudes of the so-called Furious 50s. We experienced not only a bit of their fury but also a combination of all that mentioned before.
By dinnertime, we leave the 50s being and enter the Screeching 60s, which welcome us with long rolling swell, light winds, and good weather, that on this occasion, last for most of the day. More and more people start to show up, slowly getting over the seasickness of the last days.
Excellent conditions to attend the mandatory briefings about the guidelines on how to operate and behave in the Antarctic Region, together with having a good clean of the gear we plan to wear during our activities once we arrive there.
Talks and Biosecurity that are necessary to understand our role as just visitors to these areas, try to minimize our environmental impact and avoid the introduction of alien species, which seeds, spores and such can be travelling with us on the clothes and bags that we have been using elsewhere in the world. It is warm and cozy indoors sitting in the Deckhouse, brushes, pins and needles, buckets and vacuum cleaner at hand to go through all our gear and have it as dirt-free as possible, but out on deck we start feeling the colder Antarctic temperatures.
An eye on the surface water temperature tells us about its cooling since we departed. For a few hours now, it has been of 3.5ºC and decreasing. This dropping of several degrees in a relatively short distance indicates that we are coming into the Antarctic System. We have left behind us the temperate Subantarctic waters. This water masses meeting happens all around the Antarctic Continent and is known as the Polar Front or Antarctic Convergence Area. Throughout this belt, the colder and denser waters from the south sink under the warmer and lighter from the north. A major feature on the world’s oceans that started developing when Antarctica became separated from the other continental masses, creating the conditions for the development of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. A significant event which began around 32 million years ago and had a profound effect on establishing the global oceanic circulation that we know nowadays and its influence on the World’s climate.
An old geological episode of great importance that was found and first measured not so long ago. As many of the discoveries below the 60ºS, we will have to wait until the exploratory era of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries. Once humankind officially and finally came across Antarctic lands in 1820, many expeditions followed. Enterprises both for the sake of increasing our knowledge of this remote region but also with the starting of the sealing and whaling around the White Continent and its neighboring islands. It was in 1911 when the German scientific expedition led by Wilhelm Filchner on board the ship Deutschland centered its attention to unexplored areas deep into the Weddell Sea. Amongst their many achievements stands out Brennecke’s (the oceanographer aboard) description of the distinctive water masses in the Southern Ocean and the sudden change on the surface water temperature when crossing the Circumpolar Current.
A feature that also represents a biological boundary between the Subantarctic and Antarctic biogeographical areas. And a look outside while we are at the wheel, doing lookouts or joining our guides on deck, can confirm that now we are sailing in a different region from when we started the trip in Ushuaia. The birdlife has been quite scarce, but species that like this Convergence Area, such as several of the beautiful Light mantled albatross, joined the ship soaring around us today for a few hours. Black browed and grey-headed albatrosses have been spotted too. And amongst those large gliding birds, numerous of the small Wilson and Black bellied Storm petrels flutter incessantly over the Drake Passage swells and winds. There is also a dolphin that mostly uses this open water area around Antarctica, the Hourglass dolphin. Now and then, a couple of individuals bowride the ship, showing their striking black and white color pattern. Also, not so common here, today a pod of Pilot whales could be seen close to the ship for a while. All along the 115nm sailed during the last 24 hours.