The good weather continues – it is still warm and calm and sunny. Sonice is the weather the voyage crew had to be warned: when you come home and you start reading about all the expeditions that took placehere – don´t imagine this weather. These were the rare days they coulddry their sleeping bags and air their clothes!

I can not keep writing about the weather, and we did not talk much about it today either. In fact we did not talk much at all- overwhelmed as we were by yesterday. That day started in the Lemaire Channel – one of the most famous, maybe the most famous channel in the Antarctic Peninsula. Steep mountains on both sides, almost a kilometer high, glaciers and a lot of ice – Lemaire is always impressive. To sit high upin the mast as Dan navigates us through the icebergs, growlers and bergybits is quite something.

After Lemaire we continue South and arrive to the Argentine islands.Wordie hut at Winter Island is our first visit, a rather short one as everyone seems infected by an urge to go to the Ukrainian researchstation. True – we have seen each other and only each other for quite a while now – and a remote research station where scientists work yearround sound promising. Their bar, once built of the wood intended for anew jetty, the bar is world famous and so is their Moonshine. It is in this bar the afternoon turns into evening – the night will be long andbeautiful, and that is all we say about that.

This morning the weather was as calm and relaxed as we were. Maybe just a bit fresher. In the early hours we had sailed even further South– and through the ice reached the Berthelot islands. It is here welanded – a rock of an island covered by bright snow and the greenest mosses – inhabited by Adélies. These penguins we had not seen before,and they struck us as quite different. Less loud and maybe even less melly. Smaller. Definitely the most introvert penguin we have met. They were almost silent – or was that just us? We sat on the rocks andwatched them in silence as they were sitting just there, in almostsilence– for a long time.  During our afternoon at Trooz glacier the weather stayed silent as well – water like a mirror and the only movement a big swell hitting hollow icebergs with a curious sound. Wespent a calm afternoon surrounded by ice – mountains and water – nothing else but a lot of all of that. And our ship, our home the Bark Europa. Back on board the moment arrived where we for the first time since leaving Ushuaia have started heading North.

Northwards it will be from now on. At the moment of writing we are about to finish the day by sailing through Lemaire again – the water so calm we can wave at each otherreflections. In silence.