As the new year begins, many people have new year’s resolutions, being more healthy, travel more or less. For me this year (2024) I don't have any resolutions, I am just very excited and a tad nervous for a very long trip I will be embarking on. I started the year, working for ORCA as and Ocean Conservationist and on the 7th of January I boarded Fred.Olsens Borealis, for cruise around the world! Well, the ship will cruise the entire world from Southampton to Southampton, I will just be on this cruise for the first half of the cruise. Southampton to Sydney, Australia! During the cruise we will cross the Atlantic and Pacific ocean, visit 7 new countries and sail through 1 country. We will have plenty of wildlife encounters, of course the beloved whales and dolphins, rays, sharks, fish and also many, many birds! I will split this journey up in several parts: crossing the Atlantic; North America; Central America; Hawaii & French Polynesia; New Zealand & arrival in Sydney. These blog posts will hopefully be followed by a post on my holiday in Australia and Singapore.
I am not doing this cruise as the only Ocean Conservationist, for this cruise I will be working together with Nina, with whom I have previously worked with on the North Sea back in 2022.
We boarded the Borealis in Southampton, UK. Travelling to Southampton was quite stressful, as my suitcase decided to stay a day longer in Amsterdam, rather than coming on the same plane as me. I suppose, once you start travelling more and more, it has to happen at some point. Why it happened before an almost three month travel trip?! Who knows! Luckily, my suitcase and I were reunited before I boarded the ship. So let the travel commence!
Fred.Olsen Borealis is a nice ship, medium sized, with only 9 decks. Borealis used to be the MS Rotterdam with Holland-America line. You can still notice the Dutch heritage throughout the ship. Mainly through the artworks around the ship, for example I had a painting of the city of Enkhuizen in my cabin. One of the staircases is adorned with the city weapon of Amsterdam. Which I seems a bit odd as this used to be the Rotterdam, not the Amsterdam. Enough about the ‘’Dutch-ness’’ of the ship. The majority of the guests were British, with only a handful of other nationalities like Americans, French, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. The first thing we did after boarding the ship was go to our cabins, which were next to each other, on in the front of the ship on deck 3 ''the promenade deck'' with a window looking out on the outside deck. Being completely in the front of a ship, is not necessarily the best place to be, as we would soon find out. In fact it might be the worst place to have your cabin, especially when the sea is not as calm as you would like it to be. We had some calm seas, but I would argue that the majority of the sea conditions during this cruise, were less favourable.
The crossing
The Atlantic Ocean can be quite the monstrous ocean in the winter months, with violent winter storms causing large swells and waves. Which you will feel on any vessel traversing the ocean. Crossing the Atlantic in January, I was obviously expecting this to be anything but smooth sailing, unfortunately, my predictions turned out to be correct. With the first few days being very stormy indeed. Most of our sea days the ocean was too rough to survey. Funnily enough even though the wind caused the stormy conditions, we did see the sun very often! Whilst we weren’t able to survey, it didn’t stop us from spotting the occasional dolphins and whales! On our first (stormy) sea day we managed to spot some dolphins in the morning, before we had to introduce ourselves to the guests in the. A first day on a cruise ship is always the day where you need to get a feel for the ship and its guests. What kind of guests do you have, what are their interests, do they already have some (wildlife) knowledge, can they handle a joke? All this is important for lectures and guest interactions throughout the cruise. On this first sea day there was a session, where all guests lecturers introduced themselves to the guests. On this day you will also get to know the keen wildlife watchers! Especially on this cruise, which started rough, the people who are out there with you looking for any wildlife, are the die-hards. We will later during the cruise come to rely for help on these enthusiasts, either through their knowledge of birds and other marine life (especially important on the Pacific side of the world). Or on their photography skills/gear to identify that one dolphin or whale to name a few. On that first sea day between meeting people and introducing ourselves to the entire ship, we managed to see one pod of common dolphins and one unidentified whale. The whale jumped once and then breathed one more time, before it was never seen again, it was the first of many cetacean mysteries of this cruise.
The second sea day, the swell had increased (4m), but we did see two pods of dolphins, one pod were commons and the second pod we already needed the photography skills of one of our guests. He managed to take a photo and the pod, it turned out to have been striped dolphins, which was a first for me! What is a good thing of crossing the Atlantic from Europe to America, is the 25 hour days. Wait what?! 25 hour days! Crossing from the UK to America you will cross 5 time-zones. Which means 5 days with an extra hour of sleep. Although, I have to be honest here, with the rough seas and not to many sightings, the days did drag on for a bit. Days with plenty of sightings go way faster and days with hardly any sightings last for, seemingly, ages.
On the third sea day the sea was still quite rough mostly with a large 4 to 5 m swell. Throughout the morning we had no sightings, luckily in the afternoon the wind had calmed down enough for the observation deck to be finally opened. Until then we had constantly been on the promenade deck (3). This is a deck which loops round the ship but doesn’t give us, our favoured ahead view. The observation deck (6) is located on the front of the ship, just below the bridge. For observations, being on a higher front facing deck is so much better. However, being on the front of the ship, it does leaves one very exposed to the weather, which means that when it is too windy the deck is closed. Today, it took a long time before we had a sighting, we were starting to think that this was going to be our first day with no sightings at all. Until, we noticed something strange and dark in the water quite the distance away. It looked like a dark black blob as we came closer and closer we noticed even more black bodies in the grey of the ocean. Pilot whales! Having seen the amazingly beautiful and social animals made our day so much better. And to close the day off, we had one of our best sunsets of the cruise that day.
Throughout the night into the fourth sea day the wind picked up once more to storm conditions, unfortunately. Which meant that this day we weren’t able to do any surveys at all. So what do you do on a cruise when you can’t do surveys? In fact what do other guests do on the ship? I first participated in most guests’ favourite activity, walking laps on the promenade deck. 3,5 laps is 1 mile (1,6km), so after breakfast I put on my coat and started walking my laps to get my steps in. Afterwards we settled ourselves in the Earth room on deck 5 and spent most of our day here, working on lectures. Every noon exactly at 12, the ship bell would sound followed by an announcement from the captain with a weather forecast and some information about the sea around us, like the depth of the sea and nearest land. Throughout the cruise the Earth room would become our "office" during the rough sea days. The Earth room is basically a small library on the ship with books focused on the natural world.
Late in the afternoon we decided we needed some fresh air, so we went up on to the observation deck even though the sea state was too rough. This is when a guest came looking for us as a bird had gotten stranded on the ship. We walked with him to deck 3, where a small petrel was sitting on the deck. One of the other guests on the ship was an ornithologist, and said that the animal looked completely healthy. Sea birds have webbed feet, which means that they aren’t able to take off from a flat surface like the deck of a ship. They either need to be on a water’s surface or leap from a cliff and spread their wings. One of the guests (with disposable gloves on) picked the small petrel up and, now this might sound harsh, threw it over the side of the ship. The petrel immediately spread its wings and flew away. This was the most exciting thing that happened, during this sea day.
Calm seas exist with deep diving with whales!
On the fifth sea day we woke up to a noticeably calmed sea, seeing a relatively calm sea after days of rough weather, made us very excited to go outside and spot some wildlife in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And the Atlantic did not disappoint! We started the day with 2 pods of common dolphins in a space of 40 minutes, of whom some came towards the ship to bow ride. Sometime went by before we had our next sighting. There was something strange on the ocean’s surface, something was disturbing. This is often how you spot wildlife out at sea, you notice something strange, something that looks different from the waves.
We pointed our binoculars on the strange area, and there it was: a logging (resting) sperm whale. The longer we looked the more sperm whales we started seeing. It was a small group of 3 sperm whales. Sperm whales can dive to great depths and can stay below the surface for on average 45 minutes, but they have been recorded to stay underwater for over an hour. Sperm whales are able to dive to a depth of a 1000m to 2000m where they hunt for their favourite food (giant) squid. They are also very social animals, especially females. Females will stay in groups of up to 12 individuals. After a dive, they stay at the surface resting for some time, during this time they replenish their oxygen. Unfortunately soon after our sperm whale sighting fog started to roll in, just in time for us to have our private lunch. During long cruises we are sometimes expected to have lunch with guests in a private setting to talk about the charity ORCA and the work we do. This lunch lasted over 2 hours, during which the fog had lifted and we were very keen to be outside again. After getting back outside almost immediately, we saw two very distant blows, indicating 2 whales in the area, which we think were humpback whales, but we never saw enough of the body to actually identify them. With this sighting so soon after the lunch, we thought we were going to have an amazing afternoon, unfortunately it took some hours before we had our next sighting. The sun was already getting low to the horizon, which was when we saw a strange looking wave/ white cap. It kept coming back, the closer we got the more certain we became that these white caps were actually blows, whale blows. They looked strange because the blows were on an angle. Which means that these were once again sperm whales, there were 2 in total. The sperm whales took some final breaths and then dove down showing their flukes as if to wave. This sighting was absolutely wonderful and we were still reeling with excitement when a guest noticed another blow on the horizon. We immediately went back to observation mode, and identified the animals to be another pair of sperm whales! We then stayed out until sunset before heading back inside.
Sea day 6, this was the day we expected for the sighting numbers to increase, as we were getting closer to Bermuda, so we expected the weather to become warmer. Unfortunately the opposite happened, it got colder. We did see some dolphins on this day, in the morning a small distant pod on the horizon. And in the afternoon a pod of small looking dolphins who were too shy, which meant we couldn’t identify them. Seeing the size, we do think these were Fraser’s dolphins, which would have been a first for me. However, we were too uncertain and we didn’t manage to get any photos to ID them. Unfortunately with it being January the weather is unpredictable, and instead of becoming warmer, it got colder again, the wind increased once more, which meant that we had to go back inside. But this was our last full sea day, tomorrow we arrive in Bermuda! Finally land ahoy for the first time in 6 days.
Land ahoy!
Due to all the stormy conditions during the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean we were roughly two hours behind schedule on our arrival on the island of Bermuda. However, this did give us the morning to survey and hopefully spot some dolphins. Unfortunately no cetaceans were seen. During our survey, we were enthralled with the beautiful bright blue colour of the ocean. Every now and then we were looking straight down from the side of the ship, enjoying the blueness of the sea, and started seeing the first flying fish of this cruise. Looking down to the water in this way did helped me to spot my very first manta ray! I noticed the animal between the waves, absolutely massive, but unmistakably a Giant Manta Ray. Seeing a Manta definitely was a bucket list species to see for me. It happened so suddenly I unfortunately did not manage to take a photo. I will have to travel again to places with manta rays to get my own photos, as these creatures are absolutely majestic!
After a morning with no cetacean sightings, something else did get us all very excited and that was LAND AHOY! Slowly as the morning progressed we started seeing a thin line on the horizon, our first sight of land after 6 full days at sea. It was a shame though that with coming closer to land we also moved into dark grey clouds and in the end it started to rain. Not really the paradise arrival you would associate with Bermuda. On the other hand, with all the rough weather we've had it was definitely a welcome sight!
In the next instalment about the world cruise I will talk about the visit to my fourth continent of North America! Stay tuned!
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