A New Beginning with Silversea Expeditions

   

    After being stuck in the middle seat of the middle row of an 8hr red eye flight from Miami to Buenos Aires I checked into the company provided hotel right in the mix of the old part of the city. I was able to do a lot of walking, checked out a famous memorial graveyard filled with massive tombs, crypts, and statues, and visited a local arts fair selling things from leather made goods to local foods, to jewelry made out of horseshoe nails. I met a few of the other expedition team but it wasn’t until the next morning when the vans pulled up that I realized about 20 of us were all embarking at the same time.

I knew the incoming Expedition Leader, Brad, from my time of the Silver Muse in Alaska. And my good friend Ceili, who has also worked at UnCruise and Tole Mour, would be on, but otherwise it was a lot of new faces and names for me to learn. Not to mention the fact that I was going from an expedition team of 2, to a team of 28! Pretty soon I would meet other marine biologist (Kirsty and Fede), a geologist (Brent), several ornithologist (Dmitri, Frankie, and Oscar), historians (Dot and Vic), a botanist (Viktoria) and a lot of general naturalists. I was looking forward to being surrounded by a team like this and the feeling reminded me of when I first started at the Catalina Island Marine Institute of Toyon Bay. The only difference is that this time we are all much further along in our professional careers, and the team represents countries from around the world. We have Russians, Brits, Aussies, Canadians, Netherlands, German, Austria, South African, Kenyan, Norwegian, Argentinian, Costa Rican, and three from the U.S.A.

  

   Figuring out my way around this ship, named the Silver Cloud, turned out to be much easier than my initial contract with the company on the much bigger 596 passenger Silver Muse. The bar and restaurant names were the same, deck 3 is still the crew deck where I can find the crew and officer’s mess, the crew gym, and the crew bar. So things felt pretty familiar to me from the get go here on the Cloud. The atmosphere is a bit more relaxed on the expedition style ship vs the classic ship culture on the Muse. There are still chances to get dressed to the nines for events like the Captain’s Welcome and Venetian Night, but the guests mostly stick to a casual business type dress. The other big difference is on the expedition style Silver Cloud there are no after dinner musical singing performances. Everything really revolves around the expedition adventures, lectures, recaps, and briefings for the next day’s adventures. We rotate through the voyage dining with the guests which also adds a way for the guests to interact with the expedition staff on a more one on one basis.

   

   I am looking forward to getting to the Falkland Islands and then onwards to my seventh continent after that. The zodiacs and kayaks are all strapped and ready for some rough weather on the way. We have lots of trainings scheduled and quite a few of the big wig office folks onboard as well. There are around 200 crew for me to meet and over 200 passengers to share in the experience of traveling to the bottom of the world. Antarctica here I come!