Oh, well done. What a great way to find out you suffer from seasickness: spewing on the first day of a voyage that will only get rougher, with no escape for twelve days. Well done. Gold star!

I spent all day yesterday in bed, excepting the fifteen-minute compulsory muster on the heledeck at 10:30 a.m. The doctor apologised but said I had to haul my arse up there in freezer suit, life jacket and wool-lined boots even if it meant having my head in a sick bag the whole way. I didn't throw up then - the blasting cold wind in my face kept me feeling OK - and I leaned against the helecopter hanger doors, clinging onto some random bit of red pipe to keep me from blowing away, as I watched Jane the voyage leader call the roll. She looked like a rugged mariner standing braced against the swell, the sky dark behind her. The plane of the heledeck tipped and rolled into the sea, into the sky, into the sea, into the sky. Afterwards I raced down the corridor and made it to my bed just in time. Lying flat helps a lot. I panted to settle my stomach.

About half an hour later, as I was sitting on the floor cradling my spew bag, the doctor arrived and knelt down beside me and gave me an injection. I crawled back to bed and slept until about 9 p.m., upon which I ate a banana, took another Kwell tablet and slept all night and until midday today. The doctors have just been to see me again, and brought a bottle of weak lemonade, two cups of tea and a peeled apple. Now my dehydration headache has mostly gone and I feel, for the first time, well enough to sit up in bed.

Many others seem to be in the same boat (boom boom) as the corridors seem pretty empty. Hopefully in a day or two we'll have found our sea-legs (i.e. sea-stomachs) and maybe I'll make it out on the deck by the time things start getting interesting with snow and icebergs and so forth. According to Kath, my cabin-mate who has made the voyage before, the conditions so far have been particularly bad, so hopefully it will get better.

Lying in bed now, the ship is rolling side to side. Stuck in my head is a mantra:

It's tipping my head out the window
It's tipping my feet out the door
It's tipping my head out the window
It's tipping my feet out the door...

The curtains around the porthole angle into the room like someone's pulling a rope attached to the bottom; they hang eerily at an angle; they swing back and press against the window, and the plane of the sea soars into view, hangs, and then sinks below the window again; now the curtains tip back into the room...

Until now any sort of light in my eyes has been almost unbearable. My back is sore from lying in bed for so long. I haven't been able to listen to anything on my iPod except the Chemical Brothers - anything but a dry, fast, regular beat seems too sickly to bear. Now I'm listening to the Beatles and wondering if I can make it to the talk that's happening in 15 minutes on the effect of long-line fishing on the albatross. Tomorrow Wade, the BBC documentary maker, will talk about kayaking in the Antarctic.

Anyway. Things will get better.