Uruguayan Swordfish Bill

Montevideo, Uruguay, Monday, December 18, 2006

My gift from the sea for the fourth night of Chanukkah is a meter-long swordfish bill. On my way back to the ship after a pleasant afternoon walking around the historic sector of Montevideo, I stopped on the pier to watch a fishing boat unloading its frozen catch of shark carcasses. A fisherman lounging nearby obligingly answered my questions about fish and fishing in clear Spanish. Then he called the captain of the boat to come meet me. I wouldn’t have picked the fellow out as the captain because he was toothless, skinny, and just as scruffy as all his crew. But he was friendly, and shortly went back, at the urging of my new pescadero friends, to bring me a swordfish sword. One of the sailors on my ship will help me stash it on the rope deck to dry.
The boat is a longliner that caught its load of sharks outside the 200-mile territorial waters of Brazil. It is about 100 feet long and crewed by nine sailors, two engineers, a cook, the skipper, and two fishermen who bait the thousands of hooks they soak in the sea for a day or so before reeling the line in. The fish are flash frozen after being finned, decapitated, and probably bled. The vessel traveled four days out to the fishing grounds, spent ten looking for fish, and caught a hold full in 43 days. The ship is Spanish-owned and the whole catch, including some yellowfin tunas and swordfish, plus bag after bag of shark fins, was being loaded into three shipping containers to be sent back to Spain. I wonder if the shark fins will go on to China or be sold in Europe.

When I first walked up and saw the crane lifting a string of twenty sharks by ropes in their tails, I wanted to cry. There was all the swimming beauty of the sea mutilated and frozen, being thrown like hunks of wood into trucks. But I stuffed down my feelings and played along with the macho poses of the deck hands so I could get pictures of them holding up shark fins and tails. I'll use them in my lectures to teach the guests about the shark overfishing crisis.

Despite the tragedy of the boat's catch, I enjoyed meeting the fishermen and the chance to learn about their lives and how they fish. When I was leaving, the skipper of a different boat asked if I wasn’t a fisheries enforcer. I assured him I would make no problems for him. Short of telling the world to shut down all shark fisheries, that is. But I didn’t tell him that.

Meeting the Southern Right Whales of Peninsula Valdez

December 13, 2006
Puerto Madryn, Patagonia, Argentina



The whales were here! I got to see them! In a small boat! Up close!

It was the best whale watch of my life. I actually... touched... a whale.


Yes! The calves came this close! Here's my friend Karen hoping to touch a curious calf.


A calf swims right over on top of its mother. It's touching to see how closely in contact they stay. The twelve mother and calf pairs we saw were all near the "gate" of the bay, where the moms take the babies into deep water for the first time. One calf had a ragged wound on its back that our captain said was from an orca. All the mothers were laying low, being quiet, and staying near the boat, perhaps in an effort to evade the orcas. These were the last of the 700 or so that come to Peninsula Valdes to give birth, get pregnant, or try to get someone pregnant each austral winter. The moms are getting hungry now and it's time to leave the bay for waters near Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, where they'll wean their babies and teach them how to skim krill from the water's surface. When we are back there on Wednesday, they may all be gone.


A calf swims right under our boat. This is its tail. The water was so shallow and clear we could see their shadows on the bottom. I wanted to jump right in!


The highly arched outline of the mouth is characteristic of right whales, as are the white areas, called callosities. The animal's eye is below the white patch that's near the corner of the mouth. Callosities are thickened, cracked areas of skin that in older animals become encrusted with cyamids, or whale lice, and barnacles. The young calves have very few cyamids yet.

But they do have whiskers! Click on the picture to enlarge and see the bristles all over this calf's chin. This is the one I touched. Fernando, our driver and guide, told us they like music, so my friend Chris who's also an opera composer whistled an improvisation that might have brought the whales closer. The mom came too, but not as close. Fernando told us we could put our hands in the water, that they are attracted to the motion, but not to splash at them because that repels them. I waved my hand slowly and gracefully like a flipper, and this youngster came right up to us! Three of us were in the right spot to touch the lower lip. I didn't want to upset it by rubbing its sensitive bristles but it was hard to avoid. To my surprise the skin was not only silky smooth, which I expected, but also soft and yielding. I expected it to be more firm. The bristles were softer than I'd think too. With three of us rubbing its mouth, the calf soon jerked its head away. All around the boat the smiles were wider than the sky.


Another calf that Fernando knows well, called Demosthenes, waves "Bye-bye" as we drive away. He didn't let us touch him but spent a lot of time lolling and rolling over just barely out of reach. Twice he rolled onto his side to look at us with his great eye out of the water, and several times he swam right under us. He's been known to push boats gently from behind or even to nudge from below. He likes the boats so much that our driver actually had to lead him back to his mother. Even so, he wouldn't go all the way to her -- he stopped behind us and started doing pectoral flipper slaps like this, as if to protest!


Wild guanacos at the shore line. Notice the calf second from the right. They are commonly seen around Puerto Madryn and are protected on the Peninsula Valdes.


We rode in an awesome hard-bottomed inflatable like this. The solid sand beach is very wide and the water shallow, so they load passengers on land and then push the trailer into the water with old farm tractors. They get an extra ten years out of the tractors once they're too worn out for hard farm work. The boats were very comfortable, clean, and well-powered. They're also just a little bigger than the fiberglass launch I drove at the Smithsonian field station in Belize. Fun.

Puerto Piramides gets its name from these sandstone and unlithified sand strata formations. Below this point some sea lions were pupping and many big kelp gulls were feeding their huge, fuzzy gray chicks.

Wake Up! It’s Diving-petrel Time

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Chilean Fjords, At Sea, and Straits of Magellan

I had already snoozed the phone twice (automatic wake-up calls) but the third time the phone chimed, it was Chef Stefan to let me know there was a bird up on Deck 10 at the ice cream station. That’s indoors! I made myself presentable as fast as I could and grabbed a camera, bird book, and gloves and a towel in case it was large. I had forgotten to ask. Last time this happened it was an albatross.

The guy at the ice cream station didn’t know anything about a bird. I found Stefan at the door to the open pool deck, and two waitresses were there too. They were very concerned and led me outside (thank goodness) to an alcove opposite a self-serve coffee station. One of them moved a trash can, revealing a small dark bird wedged under the bottom of the wall’s façade. It was tricky getting the little guy out of its nook but luckily the hollow only went a couple inches up, so it couldn’t get lost in the wall.

As soon as I had it in my hand I knew it was a diving-petrel even though I’d only seen them in photographs. There are only four species in the family, all in the Southern Ocean. They are a lot like murrelets in the Northern Hemisphere, small diving birds that use their wings underwater in pursuit of prey.


I gave it a quick physical exam. It was in fine shape, just scared, no broken bones or oil on its feathers. Its plumage was incredible: deep, soft, and cushiony. What a tiny bird it must be underneath that dense feather coat. It had the most beautiful bill. It was black and sculpted, with wide buttresses along the jawline. The nares (nostrils) are in tubes like other petrels, but point upward instead of forward. Its black eyes were rather large and very alert, and its little gray feet were webbed and had dainty claws.

The staff helped me take some photographs and then opened a downwind window. I was pretty sure the bird would be fine, but it still takes some nerve to throw a tiny bird off the deck seventy feet up. I gave it a good toss to get it away from the ship and it quickly straightened itself out and got its wings going. It was a bit shaky at first but soon was buzzing away on those stubby little wings and out of sight. I hoped I hadn’t messed up its feathers too much in the handling.

My bird books revealed that it was probably a Common Diving-petrel by its coloration, but I wish I’d known beforehand that differences in the nostrils are the diagnostic character for distinguishing birds in the hand. The snapshots we got of the struggling bird were okay, but the bill is blurred in all of them. I want to get better at photographing birds in hand, and maybe next time get one of the ship’s photographers to come document the rescue. I’m always so anxious to let the bird go as soon as possible that I don’t want to stress it out by making it pose too much. But here in the Southern Ocean, there is little data about most of these species, and good photographs can make useful records out of these unfortunate landings.

Who knows how long the poor thing had been hiding there. It probably landed on the ship at night, confused by our lights. When I found the bird we were at the southern edge of its known range, perhaps even south of it. I hope it finds its way back to where it came from, and if it’s feeding chicks, I hope its not gone too long.

A little while after I let the bird go we sailed out into the open sea from the morning’s protected fjords, and boy, the Roaring Forties were doing their thing. We had winds gusting up to 45 knots and seas as high as 25 feet (my guess, and some of them were bigger). A couple times the ship leaned over and in my room I heard a sound like a hollow drum being smacked with a bat. I think it was the stabilizers coming out of the water.

It was fantastic seabird weather. After my glacier presentation at 1:30 I had a good crowd looking for birds (and tips on which penguin colony to visit), and we were treated to large numbers of prions zipping like charged particles over the huge waves. These are silvery or gray-blue birds the size of pigeons that fly so close to the surface and so fast that it’s barely believable. The massive wave peaks were thousands of times more massive than the birds yet they flitted about as if over flat calm.

Today I Saved the Life of a Falkland Islands Sheep

Monday, December 11, 2006
Port Stanley, Falkland Islands

Sheep Herders Turned Tourist Drovers
Our Land Rover driver on today’s excursion to see the Southern Elephant Seals at Kelp Point was a sheep farmer named Georgena. It was her first time driving for a tour. In the Falklands, everybody who lives in “the camp,” as the countryside or outback is called, has a Land Rover or similarly capable four-wheel-drive vehicle. They are essential in the winter mud and in overland access to remote areas. When a cruise ship is in, anyone who wants some extra cash can drive tourists to the remote beaches where wildlife is to be seen. Her brother had signed up to drive, but he fell ill, so here she was.

There were four lorries in our caravan, and one of them was a Toyota SUV similar to a 4-Runner. It did all right but Georgena says she's quite partial to Land Rovers. They are the most common vehicle on the island and are truly impressive in their ability to get over seemingly impossible obstacles. However, on the tender boat back to the ship in the afternoon one guest told me that on the tour he'd chosen, one Land Rover had broken down and another broke an axle.

Georgena was the only driver in our group who had ever been to the remote beach where we hoped to see Southern Elephant Seals. And that was six years ago! She had a hand-drawn map scrawled on some scrap paper, and it was fun seeing how at various stops to open and close sheep gates, the drivers consulted on which was the best way to go. There wasn't one obvious dirt road; it's a maze out on the heaths. Most of the way we were on either lightly used or deeply rutted tracks, but the drivers had to choose tracks by looking at fences and reckoning – and using their honed instinct for getting around boggy areas.

Luckily the weather was warm. Luckily also I had packed for the biting wind I’d experienced here last season, which meant I had plenty of padding with which to make myself comfortable seated cross-legged on the floor of the Land Rover’s far back. There are fold-down seats but they put one’s head perilously close to hitting the ceiling when there are bumps. On the seats you also have to crane your neck down to see out the windows. I propped my pack full of warm layers behind for a lower back rest, folded up my coat for a seat cushion, and used my fleece vest to protect my spine from the grab handle on the inside of the rear door. I was surprisingly comfortable over the bumpy six miles of camp we covered to get near the beach.

Our route crossed a government sheep farm whose lonely farmhouse is now rented out for vacationers. Ewes and lambs in the endless fields watched us approach, but once we'd get close they galloped off comically. Since it’s Spring here, there were many lambs, and we learned a bit about sheep husbandry from Georgena’s lifetime of experience.

On one lonely hillside I spotted a Turkey Vulture jumping onto the carcass of a big fleecy sheep. Georgena explained that sheep often lie down and get stuck on their sides. They may be alive, even healthy, but if their fleece is soggy or they are weak, they may be unable to get up. Then the vultures come and peck out their eyes, pick at any vulnerable bits, and eventually kill the sheep. If a farmer comes along when the animal isn’t too far gone, they can just pull the sheep upright and it’ll trot off and live out the rest of its days. Otherwise, ranchers carry a knife to finish off sheep that are suffering too much.

When we were driving back from the beach, I spotted the same sheep on the hillside, with a Turkey Vulture standing on it. This time the sheep was thrashing periodically, its legs waving into the air as the vulture jumped out of the way and landed right back on the poor thing. I called out to Georgena that the sheep was still alive. She veered out of the line of trucks and took off bumping across the grassland toward the downed ewe.

Our shepherd driver pulled to a stop so close to the animals that the vulture’s wings filled the window frame as it launched away. She hopped out and I jumped out the back door too, hoping not to see anything too horrible. Thankfully the sheep was fine – she still had eyes, she was healthy. Without pause Georgena stepped around to the sheep’s belly and reached over its back to sink her hands into the deep fleece. With one good pull she lifted the struggling animal onto its feet and it trotted right off, wobbling.

At first it looked like the ewe had a broken leg, but Georgena said their legs fall asleep when they’re down for a while. Sure enough, as we watched, the sheep got stronger with every stride and got away from us as fast as she could. We were so happy! What a way to get a taste of local life! How often do you get to save a life on your vacation? Wow.

The Whale Graveyard
The coastline of the Falklands is convoluted and inset by innumerable mazes of saltwater inlets. That’s why we had to drive so far around ponds and marshes to get to a beach that was only a mile or so from the main road. At long last we came down onto a small bay of royal blue water framed by two low headlands. As we turned onto a track parallelling the beach I spotted a lone penguin waddling up from the water’s edge. It was a Gentoo, and Georgena spotted a small colony inland a ways from us. It was quite dear to watch this poor scared bird running and trying to get across this road in the middle of nowhere. We had to stop and let it cross. Jokes about penguins crossing the road ensued for the rest of the day.

What caught my attention, though, was a large white piece of whale bone on the upper beach. It was the cranium of a baleen whale. A few yards farther, the jawbone of a sperm whale arched up out of the sand. I couldn’t believe it! Was this a whaling beach? There were whale bones everywhere!

Even though the other lorries were far ahead down the beach, Georgena stopped and let us out for a quick look. Everywhere we walked there were huge vertebrae growing lichens, ribs half buried in the blowing sand, fragments of the rostra of rorquals (big baleen whales), and a spare humerus (upper arm bone) here and there. One guy brought me the cranium of a small dolphin. I found a pilot whale jaw. It was incredible. I could have spent the whole day there.

Whale osteology is one of my favorite things in the world. When I was in high school I volunteered for the Curator of Marine Mammals at the Smithsonian and one of my tasks was to number newly accessioned dolphin bones with their unique specimen number. That took me, for many memorable hours, into the “Bone Room,” a low-ceilinged, sweet-smelling cave in the basement of the museum where case after case of dolphin, seal, sea lion, and manatee bones are stored.

On top of the cases are the bones too big to fit inside: rows of killer whale skulls, narwhal tusks, minke skulls, big vertebrae. Suspended from among the dusty ceiling pipes are old mounted skeletons of sea lions, strange beaked whales, and little dolphins, and fading plaster models of porpoises from defunct exhibits. It’s heaven for a bio geek artist kid, and it’s still my favorite place in the museum.

After college I did an illustration of a young Minke Whale skull there, and spent many days studying its details. I also did an illustration for an exhibit that showed how the Blue Whale skull in the Marine Life Hall fits into the life-size model of a Blue Whale (that exhibit is gone now). It is still always a treat when my mentor, Jim Mead, the curator, gives me an impromptu lesson in anatomy. Cetacean bones, skulls in particular, look nothing like any terrestrial mammal. It takes a lot of looking and explanations to figure out how what you’re looking at relates to the whole animal.

As an illustration intern at the Smithsonian I did an ugly job to earn some extra money: flensing dolphin skulls. That means cutting the meat off the head so the bones can be dried and cleaned for preservation in the collection. Since it’s illegal to kill dolphins even for science, these were all strandings from beaches all along the East Coast. Some of them were quite ripe, that is to say, rotten, when they were brought back and frozen. I had to thaw them before getting to work.

Some of the heads were pristine and fresh, though, and two stand out in my memory for their sheer beauty. Both were Bottlenose Dolphins, Tursiops truncatus. One was a huge adult male from an offshore pod. He had exquisitely nuanced shades of gray striping on his smooth face. The other was a minuscule infant Tursiops, so tiny and delicate, yet with taut, perfect skin. With fresh specimens like those I spent extra time dissecting to learn more about how their jaws and air passages worked. They are so beautiful, and so incredibly ingenious in their adaptations to an aquatic life.

I’ve also spent time with Humpback Whales in the field in Alaska, and have spent hours discussing their functional anatomy with my illustration mentor, Pieter Folkens. I was so curious about Humpbacks after seeing them up close that in 2001, when I had a chance to visit the warehouse of the L.A. County Museum, I spent hours among the humpback skulls in their collection, sketching them from different angles and figuring them out.

That’s how I knew what I was seeing when we came upon the beach. It wasn’t a whaling beach, though. These were all strandings or carcasses washed ashore. Georgena says they regularly get mass strandings of pilot whales, which are large black dolphins with bulbous heads well known for this mystifying suicidal behavior. Lots of beaches on the Falklands are strewn with whale bones, if they are directly open to the sea and exposed to the wind. This one fit the bill.

The Great Southern Heffalumps
We went on to another beach for the elephant seals. We rounded a point and there they were, great big males hauled out on the grass above the beach, snoozing. To my chagrin I realized that there was no designated guide in the group, only the assorted drivers, who had given no briefing on how to behave around the animals. As we got out of our lorry another driver came over and suggested not getting too close, and not going between the big guys and the beach.

It was too little warning, too late -- people from the other trucks were already walking up to the behemoths to get close-up pictures. These things weigh five and a half tons! They have massive canines and can move a lot faster than a human if they are angry. They are flat-out dangerous.

An older gentleman from my vehicle turned out not to understand English. We didn't discover this -- nor that he was hard of hearing -- until several people were shouting at him to get away from a group of three males. He couldn’t have been more than five feet from them. Finally he got the message and came away from the bulls with no mishaps.

Eventually I was satisfied that everyone had figured out not to get too close, and I was able to start enjoying the birds and the beauty of the place. It was still sunny though very windy. Falkland bird life made itself delightfully evident in a trio of Magellanic Oystercatchers working and peeping along the shore, a family of smallish black-billed ducks including three fuzzy gray ducklings along the water’s edge (probably Patagonian Crested Ducks), Kelp Geese, Upland Geese, Black-necked Swans on a nearby lagoon, and an assortment of shorebirds.

We had a good forty minutes with the elephant seals. I had time to walk along an unpopulated part of the beach and find elephant seal jawbones among the stones. I set up a spotting scope to watch males battling in shallow water off the beach, and to spy a couple of pups on a small cobblestone island a few hundred yards offshore. It was a great visit, and the day wasn’t over yet.

Pinguinos Incognitos
Georgena led us back along the whalebone beach and then turned abruptly off the track into the tussock grass toward where she’d seen the penguins. It was treacherous going in spots but she ably guided us to a rather imperative stopping point, where any further we’d have been bogged. I finally had my first experience with true tussock grass like in the Arctic tundra. It would be very easy to turn an ankle falling into the concealed ten-inch drops between grassy mops.

This penguin colony didn't even have a name. The penguins were Gentoos, the really cute kind with a red bill and a white triangle over their eyes. There were only about fifteen pairs plus another fifteen lone adults, and each bird on a nest had one or two chicks. The chicks were beautifully cute in their handsome light gray down and curious eyes. They were about a quarter mile from the beach, far enough inland to be very safe from big waves and marine predators. In the Falklands they have to worry about rats, feral cats, and skuas raiding their nests. And tourists. They definitely noticed us, but nobody on a nest budged. It was lovely to see those half-grown chicks. Last season they were all molting into adult plumage when I saw them.

This time I was prepared to be the guide, and since our lorry had arrived first I was able to tell everyone in each truck that the penguins were breeding and we shouldn’t get too close. I went forward toward the penguins with the first people and told them when to stop, and they did. One woman insisted on being several steps ahead and getting in the way of everyone else’s photos, and another guy went off to one side to get good shots with his telephoto, but he didn’t get too close.

Then the same older gentleman walked past everybody right up to the penguins, stopping only ten feet away. He must not have understood the instructions and was probably wondering why nobody was going closer. I went to bring him back and called out, “Sir! Señor! Monsieur!” He turned around and said clearly, “I can’t understand you. I don’t speak English.” So I asked, “What language do you speak?” Spanish. I managed to convey in español that he was too close and to my surprise he obligingly backed away. He even thanked me, and I made a point of being very polite, thanking him too, and making small talk on the drive back. It was frustrating for me but also for him. It must not be fun to be left out of the conversation in a tightly packed car for four hours because of hearing and language difficulty.

What a wonderful day, a nice sense of discovery I saw many new bird species, enjoyed the elephant seals, and the penguins were darling. Even learned a bit about guiding and brought back a happy, satisfied group of guests. Everyone loved it. And I know I want to spend much, much more time in these fantastic southern islands.

Joy in the Morning: Great Wandering Albatross

Monday, December 4, 2006
8:00 a.m.
33˚ 36’ 45” S
073˚ 23’ 44” W
At sea between Valparaiso and Puerto Montt, Chile

What pleasure to wake up at sunrise at sea, pick up binoculars, and on the very first look out the window spot a Black-browed Albatross gliding over the whitecaps. Rarely a greater joy and sense of gratitude than, upon reaching the open deck (bundled in coat, scarf, and hat), to spy also shearwaters, small petrels, and finally, an enormous and magnificent young Wandering Albatross sailing on its tremendous bowed wings.

No one else was on deck at the early hour of seven. No one was there to hear my exclamations of “Good morning, good morning!” to the beautiful ones arcing gracefully over the waves. But I thought of good friends, who would be with me in exultation were they here, and of the unsuspecting guests who will soon hear me gush and swoon on stage (and TV) as I report my findings on this first morning of the first full day of the first Cape Horn cruise of the season. Alleluia! Glory be to the Tubenoses of the Southern Oceans!

Formal Night with the Penguins

Thursday, December 28, 2006
Puerto Montt, Chile, Sailing Away Northbound

"Are you crazy?" called a friendly woman in spaghettiti-strap dress through the cracked-open door onto the windy Promenade Deck. I was dancing in the fog and singing to the birds. I grinned back at her, "No! I'm watching penguins!"

Her husband in a tuxedo stood behind her but I was the one in the real penguin suit -- the penguin *watching* suit, that is: all bundled up with hiking boots, hat, gloves, and raincoat. I had planned on a quiet evening at my desk, but no sooner had I settled in than I glanced out my window and saw sandy cliffs where I expected blank sea. I ran up one floor to the outside deck to see what I could see.

The passage westward from Puerto Montt to the open sea was far longer than I'd realized on our previous transit in the dark. We skirted a series of islets in Chiloe Sound and then sailed for quite a while between Isla Grande de Chiloe to the south and the mainland on the north. Two hours earlier when we first sailed from the town, I had delighted in a flock of sooty shearwaters surprisingly near shore, mobbing a small open fishing boat a stone's throw from the shoreline. But my birdwatching day wasn't nearly over.

The outgoing tide caused a lengthwise rip down the narrow channel, right next to our ship, so for nearly an hour I was able to watch pelicans, terns, cormorants, gulls, and yes, even a couple hundred Magellanic penguins fishing along the current. It was so fun to find out that the jumping miniature dolphins were actually penguins! They are supposedly very hard to spot at sea, but for 45 minutes our course was perfectly parallel to their elongated fishing spot. Penguins surfaced nearly every minute.

Penguins porpoise beautifully, arcing out of the water like slick black missiles three or four times after a long dive. Then they pop to the surface to float and look around -- and vanish. They appeared alone or in groups of two or three and dove swiftly, often leaving nothing but a surreptitious splash to let you know you missed them this time.

We were near the northern end of the Magellanic penguin's range and the southern end of the endangered Humboldt penguin's range. On a small island nearby is the only colony where the two species are seen nesting together. I'm trying to figure out if a day trip to see these guys is feasible from Puerto Montt for next time.

Since we were coming north from Cape Horn to Puerto Montt we also saw our first Peruvian pelicans of the cruise. They are like brown pelicans but have stark white rectangles on their wings, and their deep mahogany neck coloration is even more striking. Cormorants were flying everywhere, and wafting strings of South American terns lofted over the riptide surface. Sea lions popped up here and there. Everyone was digging in at the seafood restaurant.

Just when we started to feel the faintest beginning of the ocean rollers there appeared a long rocky shoal off the seaward end of an island. The ebbing tide and incoming swell made perfect standing waves over the shallows, and the sea lions were absolutely frolicking, surfing in the tall waves. They rolled over and over like kids at the beach, periodically stopping and looking around, probably barking though I couldn't hear them, then diving into the combers again.

It was incredible to see it all. The viewing conditions were pitiful, granted, with fog, spitting rain, dripping tender boats overhead, and failing light, but it was enough to show me the biological richness of this magical corner of the South American coast. Thank goodness for quality waterproof binoculars and a window in my cabin.

This whole show went on and on while the ship's formal night stage production started and finished in the huge theater behind me. I was utterly alone on the open deck while a few hundred people listened to Broadway tunes just inside the steel wall. I'm sure the adagio couple (the flyers) were as impressive as the penguins, but for my penguin show, I got to sing too.