Amelia glacier
The Sunday before last the chaplain at worship service suggested that if music indeed soothes the savage beast, mayhap singing loudly will improve the weather as we pass the southern tip of South America, notorious for its savage storms. By cracky, it worked. We had excellent weather throughout that portion of the cruise. Indeed, the weather the whole cruise has been marvelous.
I found another book I want to buy, and here I claim to be downsizing. Hah. As I’ve mentioned, I want to write a book about worms, all sorts of worms. My evening dinner companions (tables are assigned) enjoy a great deal of merriment over this. Frankly, most of them are romance novel readers. By this I hasten to assure you that I do not look down my nose at romance novels; indeed, I once won a Romance Writers of America Rita for Opal Fire; but worms and romance novels really do not belong in the same sentence.
Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Life is a fun-to-read coffee table book that does a good job on all the worms that are not really worms, and it is an entertaining springboard for research. For example, caterpillars, technically, are not worms. Priapulids are. And it appears from fossilized worm tunnels that priapulids may date from the Cambrian, half a billion years ago.
Amelia glacier
I described yesterday the sorry, clunky excuse for a ferry that still takes people out, especially the tour trip to the penguin colony on Magdalena Island. At the breakfast table today a lady from Canberra, Australia told about a museum in Punta Arenas that I would have loved to see, but you can’t do everything. The facility has replicas of both Magellan’s ship and the HMS Beagle, complete down to the rigging, and you can see the advances in naval architecture. After describing this, the lady suggested that a replica of that ferry we took yesterday would fit nicely between the two vessels.
It sure would.
The straitest point in the strait
We finished the afternoon today by sailing back a fjord to see the Amalia Glacier. It is one of the smaller glaciers born from a vast ice field high in the Andes. The ship pivoted in place so that everyone aboard got a prime view. The vertical face of the glacier is fresh and jagged, the water in the fjord blue-green with glacial flour. Its higher latitude, plus the cold Humboldt Current, give it an entirely different appearance from the Nisqually, the glacier I know well.
Tomorrow we’ll view another Chilean glacier. Ice, chilly, Chile. There’s a pun in there somewhere but darned if I can find it.
God bless you.