Have you ever wondered what a thousand hungry albatrosses squabbling for food sounds like? Well, just a few weeks back I found out.
The location, Danger Point, a scarily-named nautical location some 90 miles south of the most southerly point of the African continent, a place where the Benguela and Agulhas currents collide to provide one of the richest feeding grounds in the world.
I had already spent five days aboard the Aloe, a 53-metre, deep water hake trawler, working alongside Barry Watkins, one of the Albatross Task Force observers employed by BirdLife South Africa.
The previous night we had steamed south-east from our previous fishing grounds, 15 miles off Cape Point. The noise of the winches having woken us just after dawn, we emerged on deck to a leaden sky, with no sight of land or other ships - and the most remarkable bird spectacle I have ever witnessed.
The ship was literally surrounded by seabirds, perhaps ten thousand in total. Thousands of Wilson's and European storm petrels, no bigger than starlings, flitted over the dark waves like a cloud of gnats.
Hundreds of sooty shearwaters and their larger cousins, white-chinned petrels, flew rapidly towards the stern on stiff dark wings. Common terns and Sabine's gulls darted in for scraps, whilst dozens of subantarctic and parasitic (Arctic) skuas patrolled above, seeking out victims from whom to scavenge.
But it is the albatrosses that steal the day. Barry estimates we have a thousand shy albatrosses, mostly sub-adults, squabbling angrily for the fish guts, heads and offal being discarded from the sides of the trawler.
I'm tempted to ask Barry why are they called shy, because they are the ones providing the deafening noise. They cackle and squawk, squabbling with each other and bullying the smaller birds out of the way, almost drowning out the constant rumble of the Aloe's engines.
Joining them astern are a few score black-browed albatrosses, whilst dozens of Indian and Atlantic yellow-noses cluster along the ships sides, avoiding the rumpus at the rear of the boat.
This is undoubtedly the crowning point of my sabbatical. I arrived in Cape Town on a hot Thursday morning more than two weeks before, to be met by Barry, my host for the coming three weeks. First stop, my accommodation, a room in a suburban house in Rondebosch, before heading up to UCT (the University of Cape Town), perched on the slopes of Table Mountain.
There, I meet the other members of the albatross team - Maria Honig, Meidad Goren and Sam Petersen - in their cramped single-room office, the nerve centre of BirdLife SA's campaign to stop albatrosses from being killed by fishing boats.
Then I hear the first bad news. Barry tells me the Verdana, the trawler we had hoped to depart on this weekend, has engine trouble. I have two objectives for my sabbatical: to help Barry produce a much-needed advisory brochure for the trawler industry, and to join him on one of his many trips to sea, to collect data on how tori lines are helping reduce the numbers of seabirds being killed.