After a few days of moving back and forth along South Georgia's north coast doing surveys, picking up supplies and meeting the British Schools Exploring Society, we had a long and rather bumpy night sail right round the west of the island and down along the south coast.
Here we are more exposed to the weather, which mostly comes in from the Antarctic circulation of the Southern Ocean, so we are now forced into a more opportunistic mode of working.
This brings mixed blessings. Yesterday we failed to land on Saddle Island in the morning because of a strong swell but later we got our record day-count for giant petrels at Samuel Islands Mainland , how cool is that? a part of the mainland that still has no name.
Around 600 GPs in an afternoon's counting, plus a few wandering albatrosses - and some of us were busy doing white-chinned petrel transect work and thus not surveying the nesting birds.
Today we're paying the price: holed up in Wilson Harbour, back west a couple of hours, riding out bad weather in a safe shelter. It's a good opportunity to catch up on data entry, write home.
A brief trip ashore after the winds - gusting 40 knots this morning - died late afternoon to discover trypots (the sealers old boiling pots to extract oil from their catch) on the beach and an ancient, weathered wreck in the stream bed: ribs and knees, blackened hard wood in the glacier-cool stream.
Tomorrow we going to try for Annenkov Island and we may land two people for a short camp. But here, on the edge of the south polar front, we'll do what ever the weather allows us - and no more.