Wind is back.

It blows a fair wind again. A calmer period is followed by yet another spell of sunny weather and good sailing. Well, good weather until you check the ship’s radar up in the wheelhouse and a stream of “yellow blobs” keeps appearing. Squalls. Showers that don’t stop sweeping over our path.

Now it is sunny and a constant wind blows at just between the high 20s and low 30s in knots. A menacing dark cloud shows up on the horizon behind us, another to starboard, yet another in front of us. The latter one is no trouble, it is just ahead, the others… well, there they come. The sky turns grey suddenly, the wind shifts, the wind increases, the waves grow and break, the waves wash the main deck. The rain falls, sometimes even hail. Then it goes away, it passes us, the squall moves faster than we do.

That is sailing in the high southern latitudes, now wind, now less wind, now lots of it. Along the Roaring 40s, Furious 50s and Shrieking 60s, squalls are frequent too.

These are driven by relentless atmospheric dynamics, where Low Pressure systems travel eastwards between centres of High Pressure north and south, the massive temperature contrasts between them and the lack of any land obstructions along the Southern Ocean. They are sudden, though they announce their presence on the radar, and a dark low cloud over the sea can be seen. Then a sharp increase in the wind force and often also shifts in its direction, now a solitary one, then quite frequently in groups or organised into long and potentially violent fronts. Squalls here ride atop an already fully developed ocean swell and a general pattern of strong wind.

Strong winds which petrels and albatrosses seem to enjoy. They fly and glide and show up around the ship now that we have the winds between 40º and 50º of southern latitude.

And amongst them, some of the largest of all, the Southern Royals. Not the easiest ones to distinguish at a distance from their brothers, the Wanderers, while flying over the ocean. Both groups of those large albatrosses were described as the same species by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The differences between the Royals and Wanderers were known since the 1890s, when Sir Walter Buller recognised some distinctions between them, like the characteristic black cutting edge along the upper mandible, but proper identification at sea remained a problem for over 70 years. It was in the mid-70s when the world-renowned British ornithologist Peter Harrison eventually gave us field characters for separating them at sea, with the creation of tables with meticulously hand-painted illustrations to separate the different species and their plumage differences, which change with their age.

Now and then, the New Zealand endemic Campbell albatrosses show up as well. At first sight, easily confused with the ubiquitous Black-browed, a closer look reveals a highly unusual characteristic of this species: their eyes are honey-coloured.

A good couple of days both for sailing, sail-handling in the passing squalls and for birdwatching when we are not pulling ropes or busy up the rig furling, unfurling or engaged in maintenance of sails and lines. Not the easiest days, though, to remain for long on deck braving winds and swells to properly identify and photograph them.