Good Close-hauled sailing on 20 to over 25kn of veering winds to a Northeasterly.
It has been blowing about 20kn from the Northeast for the last hours, but in the morning, some stronger gusts make for dousing and furling the Royals and Upper Staysails, while we sail Close-hauled on Port tack.
In this same point of sail, we follow the veering wind that is gradually becoming more of an Easterly, while our course bends more and more to the southeast.
With these good winds, we have sailed 170nm during the last 24 hours. Ahead of us 391 in a straight line to South Georgia, but sure we will have to add many more as we keep going on our sailing adventures and following the whims of the winds. Here a bit more complicated to predict as we sail now on a compression zone between a High Pressure to the Northeast of us and an incoming Low passing by over us as the day goes. Situation that brings the associated winds accordingly shifting to an inconvenient Easterly. The plan is to follow it, and when it becomes straight blowing from the East, then change tack and sail more northwards, but still, it is not predicted to happen until late at night.
A good day for birdwatching too, with quite a lot of the classical species that can be found at those open sea latitudes, including first sights of Light-mantled albatrosses.
The Antarctic prions that have been spotted at the distance during the last days, today decided to approach the ship and have a closer look at us. They are one of the common representatives of the Prion family in the areas where we are sailing, breeding along several of the islands lost in the middle of the Southern Ocean. And if there is a difficult group to identify amongst the different species, it is them; even with experience, some of them are usually unidentifiable at sea. They are from the petrel group, with their nostrils joined together in tubes atop their beaks, but they are well separated from the rest of those tubenoses with their unique pale grey plumage, a characteristic darker “W” shape over their wings and body, small size, peculiar bill structure which is split into between seven and nine horny plates, and their fast, undulating flight pattern with great manoeuvrability.
Antarctic prion scientific name of their genus, Pachyptila, derives from the Greek words pakhus and ptilon. Meaning "thick" or "stout" and “feather" respectively. The species name Desolatus is Latin “desolate,” in reference to the desolate Antarctic region where they live.