Today we arrived at S. Georgia. It was very cloudy and overcast as we approached the island. We met with the kayaking team and they were hoping to kayak at each stop. But unfortunately it was too windy. On the way into the bay we passed Fortuna glacier. Here are a couple of pictures.
Our first stop was Fortuna Bay. Here are a couple of pictures of them lowering the zodiacs into the water.
It was incredibly wind, so windy at times I had trouble standing still. The animals at Fortuna Bay were amazing. We saw thousands of fur seal, many of them babies waiting for their mothers to come back from the ocean and feed them. Some of the juvenile males got a little aggressive. They would show their teeth and walk towards us but if you stood your ground they would just back off. The babies were so cute. I just wanted to pick them up and snuggle them.
We walked further to Whistle Cove, the site of a king penguin rookery, home to 15,000 pairs of king penguins. There were teenage chicks which still had the downy feathers, as well as parents incubating their eggs and chicks. It was spectacular, like something out of a National Geographic video.
Here are pictures from Fortuna Bay and Whistle Cove
I wish I had taken a video of the fur seals because they were so cute. Here’s a video from YouTube, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BJVgx_Yslzk
During lunch the boat moved to Grytviken which had been a whaling station from early turn of the century until the 60’s. Here’s a picture of Grytviken from the ship.
This is where we immigrated into S. Georgia so we had to go through some formal procedures. While that was going on a resident from Grytiviken gave us a short presentation on their rat annihilation program. Rats had inadvertently been introduced by the whaling ships. The rats were very bad for the local animals, particularly the S. Georgia pipit, an endemic bird. There had been a huge, very successful effort to get rid of the rats, primarily using rat poison. Interestingly the effort was helped significantly by the local glaciers which the rats could not cross so the populations were self contained and could be targeted locally. They believe the island is now rat fee and are focused on prevention of reintroducing rats. Our speaker was looking for contributions to their effort.
Then we went to shore. There was an inspector on the ship checking our boots for seeds because they don’t want to introduce another problem species to the island. I had some seeds so a crew member used a knife to dig them out of my boot treads.
Shackleton is buried in Grytiviken. He was trying to organize another expedition when he had a fatal heart attack. Once we got ashore we gathered around his grave and Seb, a member of the expeditionary team, gave a toast to Shackleton, aka, the boss. Here’s a picture of his grave
There were lots of seals around. Here is a picture of a blonde fur seal. About one in thousand seals are blonde.
After that I went on the whaling tour which described the whaling process and provided details about the island’s involvement. In total, there were 175,000 whales “processed” here. It was quite a large community at it peak with about 300 men in residence during the summer months. We went to the museum and gift shop. Here are pictures of Grytiviken.
We returned to the ship for a late dinner and during the night we moved south.