We had booked our Beagle Channel Cruise with Patagonia Adventure Explorer. We were supposed to set sail at 9:30am, but we were changed from the Blue boat to the Red boat, Telienka, at the last minute - no idea why though. As normal in Argentina, it was possible to pay in US dollars. Their conversion rate was not the best, but it was certainly better than the official rate.

The Telienka was a small boat, compared to some of the others on the Beagle Channel, and took only 25 passengers. Within minutes of leaving the safety of the harbour, we soon realised how windy and rough the sea was today, this was going to be an interesting cruise.

The captain expertly guided the boat through the big swells to Birds' Island, which was crammed full of King and Imperial Comorants. From the boat, the black and white birds could quite easily be mistaken for penguins.

Continuing with the swell, we went to Alice Island and if anyone didn't see the sealions to begin with, they would certainly have smelt them as we drifted downwind. They were well camouflaged on the rock, but once you saw one, they seemed to just spring up everywhere and there seemed to be hundreds of them.

The boat continued on to Bridges Island where it cruised into the lee and a safe harbour where we could disembark to walk on the island. It didn't take long to walk to the top of the island, which had a 360 degree view of the area. The island was also an archeological site, Yamanas lived here many years ago and despite the harsh conditions were naked people who lived primarily from the sea on their canoes. When the sea conditions were too rough they would collect mussels from the shore. After shucking the shells they thew the "rubbish" outside their shelters, which formed the biggest "concheros" (shell deposits) found still seeable today.

When we got back onboard, coffee and biscuits had been laid out for us to warm up after being out in the cold and wind. The boat set off again and took us round to the western end of the island to see the Rock Cormorants, which looked quite similar to the others we saw earlier but had a red patch behind their beak. We were informed that the black and white colour of water birds is to make them "invisible", black back not to be visible from above and the white belly make them look like light from below in the water.

The conditions out on the water were getting worse and the captain made the call not to go the Les Eclaireurs lighthouse, which was quite a bit further away from Ushuaia than where we were at Bridges Island, because it was simply too windy.

On our way back to port in Ushuaia we went past Alice Island again for another look at the sealions. The crew seemed genuinely gutted that they couldn't take us to the lighthouse as we were intended but as they told everyone, they can't control the weather and our safety was paramount. They brought out a bottle of locally made coffee liquor and a bunch of shot glasses for everyone. It was actually very good, enough of a coffee taste without being overpowering and not too sweet.

The crew then held a raffle for the flag of the boat with the condition that the winner would take a picture of themselves with it in their home town. We were thinking that we could send them pictures from Scotland,Lapland and New Zealand, but the winner was the girl sitting next to us who came from Buenos Aires.

Back on land, we went in search of some lunch and ended up at Parrilla La Estancia. The restaurant was busy and the grill looked good, but it turned out to be a ****** meal. They had a buffet option that we chose not to have, preferring to go for a better cut of meat. What should have been a better cut of meat wasn't, it was full of fat. We thought afterwards that had we took the buffet option, we would simply have pushed the bad meat to the side and taken another steak, and repeated the process until we had eaten a decent amount of meat.

The rest of the afternoon was spent reading and blogging at the hostel before having soup and biscuits for dinner. We needed to do some preparation and planning before arriving in Buenos Aires tomorrow.