Ocean Tramp… Day 4 Whales and is that land?

Ocean Tramp blog Day 4
Day four of our journey – day three of the Drake – was the most eventful yet.
It began with whales.
The morning watch made multiple spray sightings to both port and starboard, beginning at 7:10 am. Patience received its reward an hour later, as we glimpsed the dorsal fins and sleek grey backs of a trio of sei whales. We spotted more water spouts during the day, but sadly no more breaches.
Still high with excitement about our whale-spotting success, we all trouped into the lounge area for a presentation by Martin Mak, Ocean Tramp’s resident scientific illustrator, about the Happy Whale project: a global request to travelers to log their photos of the whales they spot at happywhale.com.
Turns out that each species of whale has a particular feature that distinguishes its individuals from one another. The underside of the humpback whale’s tail, for instance, is as unique as a human fingerprint. Properly logged photos help the project team monitor the health and behavior of whales all over the world.
We laughed and sang along to a matinee of “Happy Feet” to set the scene for tomorrow’s potential penguin encounter. Later, we learned about the hardships faced by sailors a century ago in the movie “Around Cape Horn”. A crew member of The Peking, the largest sailing ship of its era, narrated footage he shot in 1929 chronicling the cargo vessel’s perilous voyage around Cape Horn.
After a superb roast beef dinner, brilliantly cooked by the multi-talented Martin, came another flurry of excitement: the 7:30 pm watch sighted the first land since Ocean Tramp itself passed Cape Horn. Low cloud gave the towering ice-covered cliffs of the South Shetland Islands an almost ethereal feel, as if they were floating above the sea.
We expect to reach the Melchior Islands, a chain of smaller land masses between much-larger Anvers Island and Brabant Island, tomorrow afternoon. That’s when the Antarctic adventure will truly begin!