Eager to begin our adventure, we awoke at 05:00 and headed onto deck to try and catch up with as many birds and mammals as we could during the day. The passage for the day was the stretch of the South Atlantic between the Beagle Channel and the Falkland Islands. The first hours before breakfast were very enjoyable, with good numbers of seabirds moving around, mostly Sooty Sheatwaters and a good number of Wilson’s Storm Petrels, my first. A few Slender-billed Prions were also thrown into the mix, but these were distant during the morning and good views were only managed later in the day.
After breakfast the day took a rather unfortunate turn when said breakfast made a rather sudden reappearance into the toilet basin. Over the next hours I continued to vomit a further four times, and ultimately went to the boat doctor for some medication. In the end he decided I was vomiting too much to take a tablet and so had to be injected. After this I was sick only once more before I crashed into bed and slept on and off for the next two hours.
After lunch, during which I ate little but was able to keep down, the day improved significantly. I had missed a few Fin Whales during my morning sickness which was frustrating, and although I saw a few blows from putative Fin Whales, I never saw the actual animal. A dolphin under the water added to this cetacean frustration, but fortunately this was soon about to change.
During the second half of the afternoon there were a handful of good cetacean encounters. First was when two Peale’s Dolphins started bow riding the ship, righting underneath where we were standing. Following shortly after this there was a group of my most wanted Hourglass Dolphins, with four individuals at the back of the ship but sadly not hanging around for long. About an hour later three more Hourglass Dolphins appeared next to the sun but didn’t stick around, and finally two Blue Whales swam past the ship before dinner. The latter I almost missed being inside for a drink, only catching them as they got progressively more distant.
Birds continued around the ship all day although never as many as during the first hours. A few Southern Royal Albatross made flybys, among the many commoner Black-browed Albatross. Aditionally species to our trip list inciuded Cape Petrel and Common Diving Petrel, and around dusk we picked out two Grey-rumped Storm Petrels, one of the species we wanted for this leg of the trip.
By 21:00 it was already getting gloomy, so we headed into the cabin to refresh, and me to recover after a long but thoroughly enjoyable day.
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