Sir Edmund Hillary gave another talk and slide show this morning, relating the work that he has done in Nepal for the mountain people (building hospitals and schools, helping to preserve the monestaries), and also his air trip to the North Pole with Neil Armstrong. He said at the end that of all the things he's done, visiting Mt. Everest, the South Pole, the North Pole, etc., the things that he feels are most important are the things that he did to help the people of Nepal.
The waves are estimated at 10-12 feet, and the winds are from 20-25 knots, gusting to 30 knots.
Our ETA for Christchurch is in the afternoon on the 18th.
There's a lot of salt spray outside. I was watching the huge displacements of water caused by the ship coming back down into the water after a big wave. The water shoots out from under the ship perpendicularly for at least twenty yards, where it forms a huge wave front with spray coming off the top, and blowing back at the ship. When I came back in, I could taste the salt on my lips.
It's still cold enough to sting when you're in the wind, but that's probably caused as much by the slatwater spray as the temperature, which is now well inot the 40s again.
Frozen fingers again... The air isn't that cold, really, but the wind makes it frigid. I was just out on the rear deck of the ship, watching the albatrosses (Black-browed) and petrels (probably Pintado petrels, or Cape pigeons). The albatrosses are huge: several feet in wingspan at least. They concentrate behind the ship, using our air currents to help them fly. They barely move their wings at all, except to flex them to gather the wind differently when they are moving in different directions. They swoop and glide gracefully, often coming up over the decks of the ship very slowly, keeping time with the ship, giving us spectacular views of their lower plumage, which is mostly dark brown except for a wide white stripes along the underside of each wing. The tops of the wings are entirely dark brown, and then the Albatross turns away and swoops back away from the ship, it makes a large, strikingly-dark cross in the sky, with the wings vertical and the body as a much smaller horizontal bar.
The petrels behave much the same way, but they're much smaller. They are mostly dark brown, but they have white splashes all over the tops of their wings. They don't go as high as the albatrosses, and they move their wings more. They don't come as close to the ship, but they also typically don't go as far away from it.
I saw one albatross land on the water and partially fold it's wings, though it kept them up over its body and lifted off again quickly. I didn't see any of the birds diving or catching anything in the water.