Days 6 and 7: At sea...

Here we are, wearing our red parkas with Shag Rock in the background

Shag Rock

An Albatross soars around the Minerva

This sea day brought clear skies, 40-45 degrees, and some sun…no weather troubles at all. We enjoyed the gentle rocking of our ship at night. The days were filled with lectures and sightings of whales and a large variety of birds. Late in the day, we crossed the Convergence and are now officially in Antarctica. Our first sighting of land wasn’t of icebergs and glaciers, which we anticipated. Instead, we viewed a fantastic wind-swept rock formation called Shag Rock. The rock was named after Shags, large birds that make their home on the island. The guano (bird poop) around their rookery is so prevalent that the rocks looked as if they were covered with snow (well…dirty snow). Birds were everywhere out here in the middle of nowhere. Jerry has included a couple of shots of those birds – petrels, albatross, penguins, and shags, all diving and swooping around the fantail of the Minerva. We did a very important thing today: during our Daily Briefing, we were instructed on Biosecurity Environmental Regulations…telling us all the rules we were to follow in order to protect the Antarctic continent. We vacuumed and cleaned any and all items that we were taking onshore tomorrow that might have contained seeds, dirt, pollen, etc. Tomorrow was to be our first actual landing on the Island of South Georgia, which is part of Antarctica, but not on the continent itself.