Monday morning water relatively flat for down here. Must be a start of week thing. Wind falling with pressure softly rising, gosh is this good weather just when we want that last push in! 

With almost no wind, cutter set out tight, lots of main on boom to an arrestor for a seven knot start. Where was that fifteen knot record speed run from a few gale days ago?

Sunrise proper about five forty five. Time zone here moves an hour so must make sure we change the clocks later. If we get time of course!

Softer days rarely seen, unable to gain the sleep patterns back with excitement of job in hand. More groups of bergs on the long range radar. Nothing quite prepared us for the enormity or beauty of the beasts in daylight. Like a small Chanel Island, Alderney or Sark. Totally enormous, you could have lived on them. 

The whole place so cold, these bergs so enormous they even had their own cloud formations. Small ice growlers following, bobbing haphazardly about the water, waves and rip tides licking the shape away as it melts below the surface and dances towards our bow.

Nerves still on edge, it was five minute eyeballs in the freezing air with not a single gap in the hours that followed. Breaks in the surface stop your heart beat instantly only to see the cheeky grin of fur seals as they leap about their playground. Torpedo streaks through the clear sea pop up as the Hour glass Dolphin wants to share your bow wave with the berg. Pointy beaks followed by a bright orange glow breaks the snow capped waves and disappears. So many varieties of mammals this far south, penguins they were but these were King’s not Prince Charles but King Penguins.

First land may have been Cape Butler. The fur seals larking around playing with our arrival as the large white peaks began to grow in the distant cloud base as we headed direct for Cumberland Bay.

54.15.00S  36.26.60W