We are now in Ocean Harbour - which has much better protection and more varied wildlife than Cobblers Cove, where we were anchored last night. Both anchorages are thick with kelp (as most are in South Georgia) and we now expect to have to cut quite a large ball of kelp off the anchor chain whenever we pick it up. The reindeer have had their fawns, and we've been watching them through binoculars from the boat - all legs and so awkward, but so lovely. Like foals...

We were woken this morning by a most unusual alarm clock. A large bull elephant seal - maybe ten years old - decided he really liked the sound his roar make when reflected off of HAWK's hull! It started last night around 11:00, and I got out of bed to make sure we hadn't dragged into the beach the noise was so incredibly loud. It was dead, flat calm so that didn't seem likely, but I couldn't figure out how we could be so close to an elephant seal. He left us alone for the rest of the night - luckily - but this morning he was back at 5:30. I went out and found him sitting quietly by the hull studying me with his big soulful brown eyes. Being within a foot or so of him, his head was huge - the size of a St. Bernard (not the dog's head - the whole dog!). Then he went right up to the hull, put his nose against the metal, opened his mouth and ROARED! I still have trouble trying to figure out how to describe the sound. Imagine a 20 foot long bull frog croaking... a lion with a cold roaring... But boy was it loud down below! I got a few pictures of him apparently trying to take a HUGE bite out of HAWK, but actually roaring in his own acoustic chamber.

This went on for a couple of hours, and he had the whole beach riled up with bulls roaring back and forth, certain that a new harem master had just come into the harbor. But a little while ago when I heard him around the hull again, I went out to find him taking deep inhalations about ten feet from the hull. Then another bull surfaced within four feet of him, one of the real harem masters quite put out by this whippersnapper. He took one look at the other bull, rolled his eyes until I saw the pink of his eye (they don't really have whites around their eyes) and dove. The other was after him in a flash. I suspect that's the last we'll see of him for awhile.

Not something that would happen anywhere else in the world!

We have what looks to be a fantastic weather window, so we'll be off tomorrow at dawn (now 4AM) unless the situation changes. St. Helena is 2,700nm, give or take. We will probably be slowing the boat down at night until we're clear of all ice (we can see big ice on radar but not the car sized growlers), so we expect the trip to take 2-3 weeks. We have a nice southerly flow to (hopefully) take us north of the convergence pretty quickly and then we have a strong westerly flow out of the bottom of a high pressure system large enough to (hopefully again) block any nasty lows for a bit. It's a better pattern than we could have hoped for.