We sped along during the night at a good clip, with our balcony blacked out so that the large number of sea birds. I got up early and used the elliptical upstairs, looking out at the wake of the ship and the blue waters. Since we will be at sea all day en route to South Georgia Island, there are multiple lectures. The first one was about ice and glaciers with excellent graphics on the slides, a really good use of animation. The bridge spotted A23B, the large section of iceberg A23 that split off a while ago. Soon we were approaching it … and it took almost an hour to get to the edge of it. It was indeed a massive wall of ice several stories high, with some striations and crevasses. We know that is shape is roughly rectangular, so when we went on the bow of the ship we could see what we thought was the edge of A23B and the edge of a smaller (but still enormous) iceberg that had split off from it. The captain announced that we’d be going through the opening between the two, which initially looked very far off. It was so large it was not possible to get it all in one photo so I had to do a video. About halfway toward the opening there was a large inlet on the left, and as we came closer we could see an enormous cave in the ice at water level, an utterly deep, deep blue inside, so deep we could not see the back. It looked like the Antarctic Tunnel of Love. It took almost an hour to get to the leading edge, which we passed quite close, to, only to discover that it was, in fact, not the leading edge, there was more in front on it. We passed through the opening, with great views o both icebergs, and slowly, slowly, they began to recede.
After a lively lunch with the Aussies and some New Zealanders, we had a nap, and then went up for the lecture on polar diving. There was also a stunning lecture of Diatom art, breathtaking artworks made from mounted diatoms of brilliant colors and every possible shape. Apparently these became very popular in the 19th century, and are still done today. We had a quiet dinner with one of the Australian couple, Jose and Sam, and went to bed early. Somehow we both felt tired even though we had not been off the ship. Time for a little reading and rest up for the landing tomorrow.
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