23 Feb: Penguins, training and danger peak

Location: Errera Channel

Alan here:

I am keeping this brief because we have an epic guest dispatch but more of
that later. Today we had a great time, just chilling really, out in a
penguin colony which also had a few seals scattered about. Particularly,
good was the chance to space ourselves out. With the sun out the glaciers
and the mountains it was astounding to just sit right in the middle of a
Gentoo colony and watch their various antics. Some lie as if dead or at
least I presume sunbathing. Some waddle up from the sea or down to the sea.
The young ones chase their parents trying to get food, meanwhile the large
brown Skuas hang around checking out for unhealthy Penguins or trying to
scare the parent into disgorging the food from its crop that is destined for
the chick.

We also went up a wee hill which gave us fantastic view of the big peaks
that hopefully we will manage to climb tomorrow. As it was a round hump of a
hill we decided, with irony, to call it danger peak. Tomorrow is an early
start but the guides have all now caught the cold that I initially brought
on board and has been doing the rounds, so not sure what we will achieve.
Hopefully the weather will stay good.

Anyway, we now have a guest dispatch from one of our very hard working crew,
Tamsin, who along with Alison, Chloe, and Murray (Muzza) manage a miracle
every night by producing fantastic food in very difficult conditions. They
also look after the boat, make breakfast and when we are on board, lunch.
They tidy up and do countless other duties that make out life so much
easier. So I hope you enjoy this the story of this trip from another
perspective, over to Tamsin.

Tamsin here:

Hi there, I've been kindly asked by Al and Chris to give you all a different perspective of this trip. just a bit of background first, Chloe, Alison and
Murray sailed the boat with Steve from New Zealand leaving in September whilst I flew into Ushuaia joining the boat just a week before the charter, although I first joined the boat 6 years ago, so I knew what I was in for.
There is always a bit of uncertainty before a charter (as well as total chaos trying to get the boat ready in time) as we never know what type of people we are about to share an intimate space with, what their likes and dislikes are, and what their bad habits may be.We were expecting rugged, outdoorsy, hard, adventure types and were we disappointed?...well, they play pretty hard, drinking tea and eating us out
of boat and home!! We never know what everyone's preferences are so as you can imagine, provisioning before the trip is very complex, are they tea drinkers or do we buy mainly coffee? Do they eat porridge or do we buy enough sausages for cooked breakfast every morning? are they all vegetarians? To start with it was hard to gauge as there was a bit of seasickness across the Drake Passage and I thought that all I would have to cook would be plain rice and serve dry crackers, but how wrong could I have been?!! every morning I start with a cauldron of porridge which gave me performance anxiety as I knew I was competing with the mothers of 3 Scots
men. this is followed by several loaves of toast, and if I feel awake I might scramble 30 eggs to ease the hunger from sitting around all day.Following the 3 hour breakfast, its a mountain of dishes and then we begin making the daily 4 loaves of bread. Trying to get the yeast to work and the bread to rise in the freezing Antarctic climate is not as easy as Delia Smith would have you believe, but sitting it next to the boat's diesel heater seems to work, although we often have to fight with the limited space with bottles of warming red wine and ski boot inners. Health and safety at work does not exist on here.

Bread started it is then time to prepare lunch as all of the guys get really hungry in the cold (sitting around). some days they do go out to do a bit of climbing, and I'm sure that they think that the minute they leave we all sit and put our feet up but how wrong they are. Once the boat has emptied it is time to get into the boats bilges and every nook and cranny where the
provisions are stored to fill all of the cupboards and make sure we have the staples to hand.It's not much fun trying to cook for 17 people and every ingredient you need needs to be retrieved from the bowels of the boat whilst it is rolling.and your climbing around with a head torch trying to locate the condensed milk.

The boat needs to be vacuumed and the poo loo needs to be emptied (especially after Murray's Dahl), water maker filters need to be cleaned (usually with Steve's toothbrush), Cosmopolitan needs to be read and suddenly it is time to start dinner. If we are really lucky we may get an
hour or 2 to have a quick trip ashore or out in the dinghy, but more often or not we don't get out of the galley most of the day. You may be down there for hours and suddenly you will come up into the wheelhouse, and be amazed, confronted with the most stunning scenery you can imagine. However, sitting there will not cook dinner so off it is back to the galley with the view
limited to the porthole.

The other day, I could hear what sounded like boiling fat, and I ran up and down the galley thinking I had left something on the stove or someone had put it on and left it as often happens, but what it turned out to be was a massive iceberg floating pat the porthole cracking as it moved, it was quite a weird experience. One of many.

The great thing about these climbers is that are so grateful for any food that you put in front of them, it is just a matter of cooking mountainfuls and mountainfuls of it. The hardest thing is trying to work out what to cook with the provisions we have, which requires us to become more and more creative as the trip progresses and we start to run out of things. The guys don't realise we are going to be eating honeyed carrots and spiral pasta with apricot jam by the end of the trip.When we are not cooking, as crew we are also responsible for taking our turns standing out on the bow directing Steve away from the propeller risky ice (which he always ignores and generally drives straight over the top of it), taking hourly co-ordinates and plotting our position on the chart, and helping with dropping the anchor and tying up as appropriate.Its a pretty
full on job and we are often still working at 10pm but it is so much fun and much removed from my job in normal life as a physiotherapist that I wouldn't miss the chance to be on the boat for a moment. Although, I am going to really enjoy the first shower when we get back to Ushuaia.

That is it, my time out of the galley is up and I have to go and rescue the bread out of the oven, back to the guys.