Originally written Feb 18 on the Shokalskiy.

I finally felt vaguely human today. The constant sense of drunkenness has finally passed. Perhaps due to the strengthening of my sea legs. Perhaps due to the calmer water outside the Shetland Islands. Perhaps due to the lack of medicine in my body which seemed to make me just as queasy as the ocean I’m floating upon. Regardless, today I’ve spent a lot more time out and about. Again, maybe that’s just because today there has been a lot more reason to be out and about than just the endless expanse of a dark and rolling sea.

As we have passed the Antarctic Convergence, there has been a marked drop in temperature, and deck time now has not been attempted without two layers of fleece and a parka. Sure, none of what I have experienced so far has been as cold as even a mild winter morning in Flagstaff, let alone as cold as someplace like Minneapolis, but as the winds have been blowing at near forty knots all day, just a few minutes outside turns your hands and face raw and numb.

Despite the bluster and subsequently boiling waters that kept us from making our first landfall today, I did see a humpback whale and her calf cruising alongside our starboard bow this morning. I hadn’t seen a whale since 1995, and the experience is still just as rewarding.

I’ve also seen hourglass dolphins cruising gracefully alongside the ship and watched them leaping through the crashing waves just outside the porthole from my cabin. I’ve seen penguins hopping through the water just off to port and seals spy-hopping us just to get a look at the new crop of Gore-Texed wanderers bobbing along in their ocean.

I’m not sure what I’m feeling thus far. Too much of my trip has just been seeking the relative comfort of unconsciousness. But sometimes when I’m out on deck or up on the observatory and the cold wind is stinging my face and my hands and I’m looking out on glacier enshrouded islands or onto the seemingly endless expanse of the water tossing us around I wonder just why in the hell I have brought myself to this most inhospitable and uncomfortable of places. But then there are the times when the sun is shining and the ocean is a deep, rich blue, and the only thing I can see on the horizon is my own sense of wonder.

And then there are the times like this evening, when the wind had died down for at least a moment or two, and as I was standing on the bow and looking down as we knifed through the waves, a penguin leapt up and out from the water just a few meters below me and gracefully sailed over our bow wave. And then I remember just why I am here. I’m here because all of this is here. A kid from Arizona just saw a penguin. Not in a zoo. Not in a book. And not on the television. I saw a penguin, doing whatever penguins do, and I saw it just a few feet from my own face. It’s Antarctica. And really, that’s all the reason I need.