"What is this guy saying to me?"
I was woken up at 2 am by the ship doing pirhouettes and swan-dives around me. One moment I had all of my weight pressing on one shoulder, my feet somewhere over my head. The next I could feel myself standing on the foot of my bed. Sometimes I felt my internal organs re-arranging themselves.
We've left The Beagle, I thought to myself. This is what the Drake Shake feels like.
I fell asleep again, curled up under the quilt, letting the motions of the ship slide me up the bed, and down the bed...
The next time I woke up, it was daylight. With Kirsten's voice in my head, telling me "if you stand up, you will be sick," I tried to head for the bathroom. I am so glad I opted for the twin-with-bathroom option. I made it safely inside, and closed the door behind me. There my safety ended. As the ship rocked, I was thrown from one side of the room to the other - my face pressed hard against the mirrored cabinet. I was an egg in a metal box, a melon in a crash-test experiment, an apple dropping from the topmost branch of an old, gnarled apple tree. I bruised, I pulled muscles and I somehow managed to split a finger, but I was not sick. I left little bloody patches in various parts of the ship, but I was never sick.
It would take me several days to get my sea legs.
I called in at the ship's doctor, Scott Oslund, for a band-aid. Scott had tried to come on the trip like the rest of us, but failed to be offered a place. A friend suggested he should apply to Quark Expeditions to be the medic, and here he was. He set off on his rounds, tending to those whose motion-sickness medication had let them down. I went to the bar for a coffee to and meet some of the other passengers.
Again, my strong accent caused problems.
"How was your night?" I asked the Canadian paediatric orthodontist.
"I'm sorry?"
"How was your night?"
He looked confused. "What drugs am I..?"
"No. How was our night?" Sometimes you know you should be re-phrasing your question, but you are unable to come up with alternative.
"Well, there's..." and he started to list the anti-nausea drugs he was taking. Smiling, I shook my head. I tried once more. Slowly. "How was your night?"
He turned to someone else sitting at the table. "What is this guy saying to me?"
"He's asking you what kind of night you had. With the storm."
"Oh." He turned back to me. "Okay."
We admired the ship's crew, seemingly defying gravity by walking at weird angles as the Akademik Shokalskiy rocked beneath their feet. I think I felt the worst in the restaurants on deck 3. My cabin was on deck 4, and the difference in motion between the two decks was obvious. The lecture hall was on deck 2. Warm and dark, the rocking of the ship would send many of us to sleep.
Later I went up on deck. I spent hours trying to photograph the birds flying around us. My technique was bad, and they were just too quick for me.
After dinner there was a lecture by Michael Reichmann. He showed us a series of photographs he had taken of cats in the Recoletta Cemetery, and the Boca area of Buenos Aires.
Back to Day 1
Forward to Day 6
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