Antarctic Cruise Day 18/40 - sea day - more Baggo, boats, booze, and science lies - and whales!

Antarctic Cruise Day 18 / 40 - sea day 6/11 - science lies plus whales!

Trip day: 18 / 40

Port days: 6
Sea days: 11
Countries: 3
Continents: 2
Posts: 3

When you have eleven consecutive sea days, finding things to do becomes a bit of a challenge.  

Viking has been doing a great job so far, keeping the 62 of us entertained and busy.

The multi-day boat-building competition and cocktail competition will keep us busy for the next four days.  Of course, there are the usual enrichment lectures and such.  Yesterday, the science team brought out some of their cool toys to show off.  We saw a slick underwater drone, an underwater stereo sound recorder that can record marine life sounds with directional analysis, and a plankton gathering device for recording plankton concentration.

Today, we failed as a guest team and lost to the better Baggo team – the crew.  We all had to cry into our pineapple and orange mimosas as the crew deservedly celebrated.

 

They held an officer's meet and greet in The Living Room at 12:15. Officers from engineering, environmental, electrical, bridge navigation and administration, and safety were all there to answer guest questions.

 

They are all very gracious and happy to share their extensive knowledge with interested guests.

Arlona put the finishing structural touches on our boat contest entry.  It will now move from the steelworks (our room) to the shipyard (Linda & Debra’s room) for outfitting (making it pretty). Of course, there will be no photos until the actual competition day on October 17 as spies are reading this blog. 😊

This afternoon, we met with our cocktail competition team.  We’ve arrived at a cocktail recipe and the story of the cocktail’s creation.  We are now working on a presentation so we will have an entire package to wow the audience, also on October 17.  Once the competition is over, I’ll share the recipe and story, but I can’t until then because of the aforementioned spies – they’re everywhere! 😉

As we were wrapping up the practice, the captain came on the ship's intercom and reported that the bridge spotted humpback whales.  Then, he did the unbelievable.  He brought the ship to a dead stop so everyone had a chance to see the whales.  They were literally everywhere.  They were on both sides of the ship, out front - everywhere.  We've seen humpbacks before and heard them blow, but this was the first time we've heard them talking.  They were quite loud and let out a series of squeaks and groans as they blew.  It was incredible to hear.

Over an hour or so, I took over 1,500 photos.  Here are the top 50 or so.

This was a full breech and the following huge splash

They appeared to wave at us

Flukes and fins

Preparing to slap the water

And...the slap

Nice fluke shot

Flukes and spouts

There were so many whales!

It is one thing to see them on a whale watch, but a whole different thing to run into such a large group in the open ocean.  It was simply amazing. And, a huge thank you to Captain Olivier for taking the time to allow us to experience this.

Tonight's entertainment was a Liar's Club - specifically a science Liar’s Club. Four of the ship’s science crew were presented with four scientific words.  Each provided an answer for each word.  Three of them were lying and one was providing the actual answer.

The audience only guessed the non-liar in one of the three instances, so the science team is pretty adept at coming up with convincing non-truths.  It was fun for all. 

It was a beautiful night to look at the stars out front.  Unfortunately, the ship was moving a little too much to get a good photo, due to the long exposure time needed.  That didn’t make it any less beautiful.

Tomorrow is yet another sea day.