Cape Town to Tristan da Cunha – Sunday to Wednesday (November 28 – December 1)

The weather has improved and the swell has dropped, thankfully! It has given me some time to do some exploring of the Baltic. This is not a ship full of opportunities to occupy the mind, boredom is a problem… But there are two gorgeous Border Collie pups, Skye and Tom, in the forward hold who need regular exercise and love which gives me something to do for a couple of hours each day. Most days revolve around waiting for meals (which the cook prepares somehow in kitchen that is rolling around), chatting to the other passengers, who are an interesting bunch to say the least, watching movies, reading and playing games. Thank you, Kobus, this is a freaking awesome laptop!

The view from my cabin

My cabin, my bunk was on the top right

The passengers and crew:

The passengers are an eclectic bunch: Anna, a PhD geology student from the University of East Anglia who is doing a risk assessment of the Tristan volcano; Leon, the islands IT guy who would like nothing more than to move to Cape Town and work there; Jim and his wife, two ex-pat English who are coming to the island to serve as the education officer and hopefully provide a better standard of education to the island population; Charles, a Zimbabwean engineer who is coming to the island to assist with the repair of the gantry crane that was damaged in a massive winter storm; Andrew and Dorian, the owner and logistics manager respectively of the fishing company that owns the Tristan concession (they don’t mix with the plebs in steerage much) and last but not least, the “Bulgarian Lady” (whose name no one can pronounce let alone spell) who is coming out to the island to visit her husband who works for the fishing company. She is the oddest of the passengers, giving the cook sleepless nights with her weird dietary preferences. For instance, she doesn’t eat white meat and believes chutney is poisonous because it combines sweet and sour flavours… How the Asian population has then survived centuries on a diet of things that include a large proportion of things sweet and sour is quite beyond me J

The crew are an interesting group too, mostly Polish (hence the Baltic Trader) with a Cuban 2^nd Engineer, a South African Chief Engineer, a Senegalese steward and a Cape Coloured cook. The Polish crew’s English is very limited, and so they keep much to themselves, the others are far more outgoing and friendly and have done their best to make this trip enjoyable. Particularly Jerry, the cook, who manages to cook really well in a kitchen that doesn’t stay still.

Hopefully we should be able to see the island by tomorrow morning, and even more hopefully the weather will be good enough for us to land. Apparently the harbour at Tristan is situated rather poorly and suffers really badly in a North Westerly swell making the harbour unusable. We shall see what tomorrow brings.