February 9 - The Best laid plans …

No internet connection for 3 days so here come a bunch of things.

Last evening Iggy, the expedition leader, told us that because of weather we were altering our plan for today and heading up to the Antarctic Sound and hopefully going to a place called Hope Bay, which might provide enough sheltered water to do some kind of off-ship activity. A little later the captain came on and told us that there are a couple of weather systems around and that it could be rough overnight and visibility would be poor because we were passing through snow squalls. At the show, Jan, the cruise director, said there were Plan A and Plan B ready to go depending on the weather.

Well, overnight it was pretty rough and visibility didn’t improve so we didn’t get to where we wanted to be,  Instead, we’re sailing through some rather interesting icebergs and we’re headed to Elephant Island, Shackleton’s  jumping off place for his rescue voyage to South Georgia.  As I write this the sun has come out.  The cruise staff has decided this will be a regular sea day so the program has been rewritten.  I guess it’s plan C or D.

I wanted to mention the show last night. The entertainer was my zodiac buddy Harry the Piano.  He was absolutely fantastic!  He played a little Mozart, a medley of Gershwin, some tunes he wrote himself and then he did what I consider the most challenging thing of all.  He asked the audience to call out songs to be played in any genre they wanted to hear them played.  So he got things like Achy-Breaky Heart as a lullaby, anything Britney Spears played a la Swan Lake, the Pink Panther as a waltz and several others. After just a moment’s pause he proceeded to play a medley of the strange assortment he’d been given in the styles requested.  It was amazing. I really admire people who can sit down and play as he did. Wow!

It's afternoon and I have a little down time between things on my to-do list. It’s still sunny but we’re doing some rolling.  In one of the talks yesterday we got an explanation of the Beaufort Scale of winds and I think we must be at a 4 or 5.  It’s enough that once again we all look a little tipsy as we walk around.  We played trivia, the start of a new round, and we haven’t gotten any smarter in the last few days.  I see it’s time to go to the next lecture; this one is being given by my dinner host the other night, the man who recreated Shackleton’s rescue voyage, so it should be good.  More later …

Here are a couple of photos made by Harry which he sent me.

This is the moon rising over Antarctica on our second day there.

This one is really cool I think.  It's the reflection of our ship on a very large iceberg we passed.