At Sea
Our long transit up the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is now well underway. Today is the third day of our four-day crossing from South Georgia to Tristan da Cunha, the first of our open ocean legs. Outside, the south Atlantic is now showing us some of its wilder side. Winds have risen out of the north during the night and though the wave height remains quite moderate, we have a steady 40 knots on our bow, gusting occasionally to over 50. Nevertheless, in fact partly as an effect of the powerful winds, it is a beautiful day at sea. Spray and spume blow off the crest of each wave like lace while rolling whitecaps appear and vanish all around us under the pearly grey light of a high overcast. Those of us who are keeping a watch from the bridge have seen a number of seabirds winging over the waves, shearwaters, prions and albatross, the real masters of the wind.
We have left the Antarctic in our wake. Our experience there was a fantastic panoply of unique and wonderful wildlife, above and below the sea; but this is only a small part of this epic voyage. Greater than any one place along our route (even South Georgia!) is the tremendous variety of places and species we will encounter. Moving northward now, we are beginning to track the biogeographic changes we will experience through the rest of our journey. The seas are warming with every degree of latitude we traverse; Antarctic species are giving way to those of the temperate regions; today we are the roaring forties, but soon these winds will give way to the Horse Latitudes, the Trade winds and the Doldrums.
We are also entering a new phase of the journey, a series of visits to very small and remote oceanic islands. These isolated mountaintops of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the waters that surround them are like rare and precious jewels, each with a unique history, culture and biodiversity. For the next three weeks we will have a rich and very unusual experience of the Atlantic, enormous in scope as we travel over thousands of miles of open sea, yet tightly focused on a wealth of detail as we call in at some of the loneliest islands in the world.
