At first when having an “At Sea Day,” one might wonder how they will spend the day; some might even entertain the idea of relaxing for the day. It’s always interesting to hear from some people that they found the days travelling between locations as the most exhausting and a lot of people remember them as their favourite days of the expedition. Other than the chance to spend the day on what has to be one of the most beautiful expedition ships in the world, the National Geographic Orion, the highlight is being able to attend presentations by the National Geographic representatives and the expedition team.
Today we started off with the presentation “On Assignment with National Geographic,” held by our National Geographic photographer Jeff Mauritzen. It was fantastic to get a firsthand account of the travels Jeff has taken as a photographer for the society and a lot of people were very interested to hear how he came to be in the position he is in today. It is always intriguing to find out how people come to be in such a prestigious position and to have developed the skills Jeff has to produce such amazing images. I think after the presentation we all felt inspired to go out and capture images ourselves.
After an amazing Japanese-inspired lunch put on by the hospitality team, we were ready for our next presentation. We heard from one of our naturalists, Cristiana, on “The Wallace line: Evolution in the Indo-Pacfic!” We heard about the lesser known involvement of Alfred Wallace in the theory of evolution. Wallace is considered the father of Biogeography and discovered huge differences in regions and helped changed our understanding of the natural world during his life.
In the afternoon I discussed how easy it is to identify coral reef fish. We learnt that by looking at the fish in a different way and taking note of some key factors, everyone could identify one of the thousands of fish all the way down to its scientific name.
So, our relaxing day at sea ended up being a workout for our brains and all the things we learnt were relative to our upcoming expedition, putting us all in good stead for our future adventures.
