February 14, 1994

9:00am

We finally got to sleep in on the ship. Didn't wake up until 8:30am. There's someone working outside on the deck though, pounding away at something or other. But it's easy to ignore if you're sleepy enough.

Today we're doing nothing but cruising, I guess. Soon, we should reach a point where the continent no longer protects us from the southern ocean's currents, and it will get rougher. Certainly not as bad as the Drake Passage, but probably worse than anything since. It'll actually be nice to have something interesting happening again. Today, since it's Valentine's Day, we'll have our Valentine's Day and Antarctic Circle-crossing champaigne reception and another formal dinner. Yuck. There'll be at least two lectures today, but one is just a slide show of a visit to the South Georgia and Falkland Islands by Nigel Sitwell, and the other is Des Bartlett talking about his latest film. I guess it's something to do to pass the time...

7:15pm

I went to Nigel Sitwell's slide show of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands in the morning, and I went to the screening of the Bartletts' Survivors of the Skeleton Coast in the early afternoon. I spent the rest of the day sleeping. Right around 7:00pm, we finally reached the band of pack ice that we knew was waiting for us here. It is very wide this time, stretching farther than I can see to the left, right, and straight ahead. It may be up to 30 miles wide, so it will probably take a long time for us to pass through it. We're moving at a crawl right now.

In half an hour or so, we'll go to the champaigne reception for Valentine's Day and crossing the Antarctic Circle. The show looks pretty boring this evening, so I'm not sure yet what I'll do after dinner.

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