At Sea Halfway between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope

You can’t get much farther away from anywhere than where we were traveling today. The Endeavour crossed the point equidistant between the two famous capes that protrude into the Southern Ocean, being almost 2000 nautical miles from both Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, and 1500 miles from Antarctica. Today we can consider ourselves in the most remote place we will reach in our five-week oceanic voyage, farthest from every continent. (Of course, some people might argue that we are only two miles from land, but that would be below us.)

Despite being in the middle of nowhere, in a true no man’s land (and without land!), there are objects of interest in the seascape, most of them flying. Our onboard ornithologist exclaimed that we were in the midst of world-class sea birding! Indeed we enjoyed seeing nearly twenty species of ocean-going birds today, mostly all tubenoses, including the relatively rare soft-plumaged, spectacled, Atlantic, great-winged and Kerguelen petrels. And if you ever wondered where Arctic-nesting long-tailed jaegers might be found in the off-season, try here. At the conclusion of Richard White’s discourse on the world’s albatrosses, largest and most gliding of the avians, thirty percent of the world’s recognized albatross species (4 of 14) could be found soaring off the aft deck for photographs.

Now it’s not the size of the lens or how expensive the camera, nor whether it’s digital; it is the eye of the photographer that creates a good image. (Of course, better equipment might help you nail those sharp full-face tubenose shots.) Most people who tried today were able to catch pictures of albatrosses and other wind-loving birds on the freshening breeze, no matter the camera.

Given that we are traveling one of the most remote stretches of our planet’s surface, we could not be sure what we might find. It is exciting that there that there is a diversity of winged life that can exploit these vast ocean spaces, and that we are able to capture some of it with photography, even if our camera isn’t as big as the guy’s next to us.