A free day at Puerto Madryn, originally a Welsh colony, because the ship arrived early and nothing was organized.

We had left the Falklands a few days before, which was very British and where there were many references to the war in the ’80s. Here was the counterpart in Argentina, a monument to the war in the Malvinas.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the day was the pair of sea lions (originally three, I’m told) that settled down on the fairly small flat surface of a buttress on the wharf while the tide slowly receded and left them more than 20 feet above it.

I’m not sure when low tide was and how high they would have been then. Late in the day, they dropped 20 feet to the sea in order to leave.

Unlike the photographer above, I wasn’t prepared to take the risk of overbalancing and landing on top of some combination of chains, sea lions and buttress, so I lay dow on the wharf to take the images above.

This gives some idea of how far out of the water the sea lions were. It also shows something of the size of the ship and how large the waves would have been in the Drake Passage when they were washing on deck at the stern of the ship.