The day started at 7.30. I had some toast, luckily I'm not addicted to Vegemite like many of my fellow Australians. (If you're lucky you can perhaps grab a bit of Vegemite from someone's secret stash, otherwise you have to raid the pile of New Zealand marmite in the mess which just isn't quite the same.) After this I checked the cleaning roster (today, there was also a cleaning rooster drawn on the blackboard, which, strangely for a rooster, had apparently laid eggs). Duties on the roster, not the rooster, might include cleaning the heads (that's toilets for all you non-sailors), cleaning the pantry, sweeping and mopping floors and alleyways, cleaning the showers, the bridge or the office, or sorting out the garbage into appropriate recycling categories and taking it to the correct bins on deck. Later on I did my washing, the difference on a ship being if the floor is shaking more than the washing machine is, then it's not a good wash day! Needless to say, this has meant I now have quite a collection of smelly socks.

And then, I'm sorry to say, I spent a lot of the day in front of this computer. Of course, the view from my window was quite spectacular and constantly changing, with the beautiful island of Cheju appearing at all angles - we've now managed to circumnavigate it in our fruitless quest for marine mammals. It has been quite disappointing seeing not one single whale or dolphin, considering that Cheju is supposed to be a prime habitat for finless porpoises. I feel sorry for the KFEM cameramen on board who have had to resort to filming us doing the cleaning!

I'm also starting to worry about our reception in whaling towns - so much for warm welcomes. I was also disappointed to read last night some of the truly horrendous science being used to estimate how many whales and dolphins there actually are around here - a high school biology student would fail giving that kind of evidence. We only hear media reports and science debates in snatches via email, or faxed from land, so it's also strange being cut off from the huge wash of media we are usually surrounded by, and hard to judge what we are up against.

Anyway, right now I'm eating two-minute noodles (extra spicy flavour, provided by our Korean friends) and watching the aptly named Oceans 12 in the mess (and envying George Clooney's large glass of red wine, oh what I would give!). It's great to have a bit of a break, at least in our heads. But, like I think Tapio was trying to say, we're always in this space, and it's a whole new dynamic working and living in it.