200nm behind us counted from noon to noon. A good day of sailing on a southeasterly course at an average speed of just over 8kn. 

Yesterday, showers and squalls made for dressing on waterproof and foul weather gear, both for the occasional rain and for the swell splashes sweeping the main deck as they break over the ship’s railing. A day of rolling and heeling. Today the sun shines and the frequent squalls from the last hours ease down. Westerly and Northwesterly wind still blows above a good 25kn. But by the end of the journey, when the evening twilight takes over the blue skies, the conditions abate, and the wind dies down and veers to a Northerly. Time to set more canvas that has remained furled under the blustery conditions of the last couple of days. 

At nighttime, the skies are clear and starry, and a bright moon shines. The constellation of the Southern Cross points southwards just at our Starboard bow, ahead of us. We are getting deeper into the 40s latitudes, routing our way on a quite similar manner as the merchant Clippers of the world trading in the 18-hundreds. By then, these sailing vessels found the fastest sailing route around the world over the high latitudes of the Southern Ocean, a large belt of predominant westerly winds and eastbound currents. Their imposing figure, sailing cargo for many years between Europe and the Far East, Australia and New Zealand (and back to Europe) “ran their easting down” until the opening of the Suez (1869) and Panama Canals (1914), together with the introduction of marine steam engines. A new sort of ship that needed a reduced number of crewmembers and traveled in a different approach to the seas, where it is easier to become cut-off from the ocean and storms building around the vessel. A big difference from a ship under sail, where a continuous and closer look must be kept on weather and swells, where everybody has to react to the changes and whims of the sea and wind around. 

And under sail in such a manner, we try to sail along all the South Pacific.  

After about 10 days aboard, we fall into what we can call a sort of two-faced routine. On one side our lives are driven by the watch system, coffee, and meal times. A routine of taking the wheel at given time slots, joining on the fore-deck for a lookout time, bucket and rags in hand doing the daily cleaning of the ship at set hours, attending sail training talks and lectures, sitting on the daily meetings from the Captain after dinner. A pattern that is often broken by a sudden call asking for hands on deck to quickly douse sails, or to set them back in better weather. To climb aloft to furl canvas or to prepare it to be set, brace the yards to adapt to the wind changes. 

And as we do ourselves now, and as the historical Clippers of the cargo-sailing era were doing, the southern ocean seabirds found out much earlier the advantages of the West Wind Drift, the Circumpolar Current, and the eastward wind belt on the southern high latitudes. Since immemorial times they glide and soar over the roughest of the oceans, spending most of their lives at sea and just going ashore for nesting, most of them on remote islands of this part of the world. 

A look around while we are on deck, or attending every couple of days to the Southern Ocean Seabird Survey that we are conducting, always reveals interesting species.  

The so called eBird survey helps researchers understand the distribution of birds at sea and how they use the oceanic habitat. 

A solitary Campbell albatross pay us a visit, very similar to its more common relative, the Black-browed, they show distinctive straw coloured irides and a larger eyebrow. Eventhough their breeding grounds are restricted to Campbell Island and Jeanette Marie islet, they disperse through the South Pacific. Every day also several of the black coloured petrels fly around the ship. A group of species that even though are quite similar amongst them, we take the risk to try to identify them as the more ubiquitous White-chinned petrel, with its white spot under the yellowish bill, the Grey faced petrel, seen quite often around their home, New Zealand, and a larger dark and black billed one that could be a Great winged petrel, which although have their nesting places in remote islands of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, plus a smaller population from Southwest Australia, ranges in their flights to the West Pacific too.