Our visit to Albany marks the half way point of our cruise. We took an excursion to a whale processing plant which operated from the 1950s to 1972. This company killed whales with a harpoon gun, then parked the carcus in the bay. They then processed the whales on land. We got a detailed and rather gruesome explanation of how it all worked. It’s hard to get a handle on how big whales are. Here is the skeleton of a Pigmy Blue Whale.

A regular Blue is half again larger. Here’ a picture of its mouth, using actual whale bones.

Albany was founded in 1852 with a ship load of prisoners and prison guards. The ship is called the Brig Amity. Here’s a picture of a replica. The tour guide gave the number of people aboard (which I promptly forgot). How could they possibly put that number of people on a very small ship? It seemed impossible at the time. I found the answer when we returned to our ship. The Brig Amity left from Sidney, not England. That’s rather a shorter sail with calmer waters.

The other highlight of our tour was The Gap, informally known as suicide point. The force of water hitting the walls of the inlet were very impressive, and we were there on a calm day.

The Gap is high on a hill. Here’s an interesting pic of the bay from a high viewpoint. Those rocks in the water turn out to be quite interesting, if you are a geologist. A few hundred billion years ago, Antarctica bumped into Australia. A couple of hundred billion years later, it separated. This left rocks not normally found in Australia, with a perfect match in Antarctica.

This last pic is just a nice view of the harbor.

We have a couple of sea days coming up. After setting our clocks back several times, gaining extra hours to sleep, we will start giving those hours back. I hope this finds everybody doing well.