As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, nobody slept well last night. This morning we continue to have large 6-8 meter swells, that’s higher than anything we have seen so far, and 45 kn of wind.
We had breakfast with Adam, the bird naturalist. He has been down here for about 15 seasons and has run diving programs on several trips (our trip does not have a diving program). He was telling us about a season in which he did four trips. On the first trip a 38 year old man with a heart condition died while diving, on the second trip a man fell down the stairs and fractured his skull (he didn’t die) and on the last trip someone committed suicide by jumping off the boat. Surprisingly Adam came back.
Again we had two talks in the morning
1. The history of Ushuaia and Tierra Del Fuego. I started out at the talk but had to leave to come back to our cabin and take a nap.
2. Our expedition leader, Hayley Shepard, attempted to kayak around S. Georgia to raise awareness for the albatross. She showed a documentary entitled Soul of the Sea about her trip. It was very moving and I recommend you try to watch it.
During the lectures the waves were up to the windows on the third deck. Just to give you a sense of how high that is, the portholes in the cabins on the second deck are above the water line.
In the afternoon the doctor on the ship gave a talk on how to live until you are 100. The basic message was be mindful and avoid stress. Then we had a meeting about disembarking. During the meeting we entered the beagle channel and a pilot came aboard to guide us to the dock.
That night there was a captain’s reception with champagne and a special dinner. It was bittersweet because we have made many friends on our trip.
We spent the night tied up to the dock. No more rocking and rolling.
We slept in at least a little bit this morning. The sea has flatten out quite a bit. We had two lectures before lunch:
1. Diving in sub zero waters-very interesting but no thank you for me
2. ICEolation- 4 years ago, our kayak guides, Sophie and Ewan, spent two weeks kayaking for 100 miles along the peninsula. They filmed their journey and it is being made into a film entitled ICEolation. Information about it can be found at ICEolationfilms.com.
And one lecture about the Antarctic climate after lunch.
In the evening, we played balderdash with the crew. They selected five scientific terms and then six of the staff gave definitions and we had to pick the right one. All of the staff have wonderful senses of humor so it was really quite funny.
We are going through the Drake passage so the seas were quite rough and everybody had trouble sleeping. You would roll across the bed with the seas. Also the boat would slap the water which would wake us up. Nobody had a good night sleep.
The ship moved overnight. We moved 61 kn in 11 hours so we were going very slowly to avoid hitting any ice. Our destination was Danco Island. Danco Island lies in the southern end of the Errera channel. It is relatively small, 1.6 km long, but quite high (180 m or 590 ft). The view from the top of the island is spectacular due to the heavily crevasses glaciers in the surrounding mountains. Beautiful rolled iceberg also tend of collect in this area of the channel. It is also home to 1,600 breeding pairs of gentoo penguins which breed quite high on the slopes.
We were hoping to kayak but it was too windy. So we went ashore. There were lots of gentoo penguins. We could get a sense of the “penguin highways” that the penguins use to get to the water. We learned that penguins nest on land so the penguins who arrive at the island early to build their nest have to go quite high where the wind has blown the snow off the rock. This means they have to walk quite a way to get to the water to feed. Gentoo penguins lay two eggs so many of the penguins had two chicks. You can get quite close to them. They will start to walk away from you if they feel uncomfortable by your presence. Sometimes they are walking and will stop until you cross their path. While we were waiting for the zodiac there were three penguins who came ashore and just hung around for awhile because they felt like they had no where to go. Eventually they got back in the water and swam to another spot. Here are more penguin pictures.
We walked up to the top of the island. It was about a 30 minute walk over rocks. The view from the top was pretty good, even though it was a little overcast. Here are some pictures.
After lunch we went to Waterboat Point the location of a Chilean research station. I think we went there mostly because everyone wanted to actually stand on the continent. Thus far we had been on islands but not yet been on the continent. The research station has 11 Chilean military personnel and they do some meteorological and penguin research. There were loads of gentoo penguins there. Here are some pictures of the research station.
We were going to stop in paradise harbor or at least zodiac cruise but it was too windy so that was scrapped. At that point we had to start back for Ushuaia. The seas were pretty rough but Rick and I felt fine.
We had an early morning wake up, 5:00 am. We were going zodiac cruising along Spert Island, an Island lying off the western extremity of Trinity Island, in the Palmer Archipelago. It had many channels through the island. Interestedly there were icebergs that had gotten stuck in the channels.
There was also a huge iceberg that was grounded and had evidence that it had rolled. Clearly it was not from the immediate shoreline because it was much taller than the glaciers on the island. Here are a couple of pictures of the island and icebergs.
Here’s a picture of the Antartica and our ship.
Here is a picture showing how bundled up everyone is on the zodiac.
We saw some Wedell seals but they just looked like slugs on the rocks. We stopped and watched some chinstrap penguins, waddle down the rocks. Quite often they lost their balance and would slip and slide into other penguins. The video is shaky because we were in the zodiac.
Finally, we watched three humpback whales for quite a while. They were about 50 ft from our zodiacs. They seemed quite curious about us because they stuck around for quite awhile. It was really fantastic, so big and yet majestic.
During breakfast we moved the ship to our next location. En route we came across a pod of Orca whales. There were 10 orca whales and our naturalist believes they had just killed a whale by drowning it and were feeding on it. There were lots of storm petrols feeding on oil, from the dead whale, that had floated to the surface. We watched it for about 45 minutes. Fabulous!
Next stop, Hydrurga Rocks, a small island lying in the northern part of the Gerlache Strait, and named after the leopard seal, Hydrurga Leptonyx. We spent about a half hour kayaking. Here are pictures of our guides readying the kayaks.
We left the ship in a zodiac and moved to a zodiac which was towing 9 kayaks. To move from on zodiac to the other, they pull the zodiacs right next to each other and then we had a sit on one zodiac pontoon and slide over to the other pontoon and swing your legs into the other boat. Not really tricky but the thought of potentially falling in makes one do the maneuver quickly. Then to get into the kayak we would get on the pontoon put our feet on the seat and then move our butt to the kayak behind the seat. From there we just slide into the seat. Getting out can be a little trickier but it’s pretty much just the reverse. The guides are amazing because they often have to adjust the foot pedals while loading kayaks. They are hanging out of the zodiac into the kayak, they look like they are hanging on by their toes. I asked one of our guides if she had ever fallen in, she said no.
We had a nice kayak ride and then had an option of continuing to kayak or going ashore. The rest of the ship had spent the whole time ashore. I went ashore because this was the only place we were likely to see weddell seals and Rick switched to a single kayak and kept kayaking.
Ashore there were several very large weddell seals sleeping, not be bothered a bit by 100 people tromping by and taking pictures.
There were also a lot of chinstrap penguins. I can post pictures of the penguins so you can see them, but lucky for you, you can’t smell them. They smell pretty poopy.
After a quick walk around we went back to the boat for lunch.
While we were moving to our next location there were a pod of humpback whales. Hannah, our marine mammal naturalist estimates there were 30 whales, some mothers with babies. We watched them for a while before moving on.
Cierva Cove was our next stop. Cierva Cove is a deep inlet on the western side of the Antarctic peninsula, on the south side of Cape Herschel, within Hughes Bay. The Argentinian Base, Primavera, overlooks the Bay. The area surrounding the base is a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) because of its rich botany and wildlife.
This cove was filled with ice. It was really beautiful with ice of all shapes and sizes. Most had a very blue hue to them. The older ice is called black ice; over the years it has had most of the air squeezed out of it so it is very dense and much clearer. Our guides said it could be as old as 30,000 years. It was pretty easy to spot because it looked very different than the newer ice. We also saw a leopard seal. Here are pictures from our kayaking
We kayaked over small pieces of ice called growlers and it was weird to feel them scrapping along the both of the boat. We had to keep out distance from the larger pieces of ice because they could calve or roll which could create a large wave. We had quite a long kayak and finish by rafting up and having hot chocolate.
As we were getting out of the kayak and back into the zodiac, Rick almost fell into the water. As he was getting out, the kayak and zodiac separated slightly so when he moved his bum to the zodiac pontoon, he ended up just on the edge of the pontoon. He started to slip off as he moved his legs over. He ended up with both legs up in the air and luckily the guide grabbed his leg and rolled him into the zodiac. Even the guide thought he was going to end up in the water. Of course he had his dry suit on as well as a life jacket but I’m sure it would have been really unpleasant. All’s well that ends well.
That evening we had our usual briefing and then dinner.
The plan for today was to sail by Elephant Island and go ashore if we could. We were up early and during breakfast they announced that an iceberg had been spotted which cleared the dinning room. Here are pictures of several icebergs spotted today.
About 8:30 we started to see Elephant Island. It pretty much looked like any other island with a few glaciers on it. Here are a couple of pictures.
It turned out that the seas were too rough to go ashore.
After we passed Elephant Island, we continued our journey to the peninsula. Rick and I took a nap.
In the afternoon, we had a quiz covering the trip so far. Our team, the polar attitudes (the name of the cruise line is polar latitudes), won. We won a bottle of champagne, split between eight people.
That evening we had our briefing during which our expedition leader told us about the itinerary for the next day and the weather. Then we had dinner and made it an early night since it’s likely to be an early morning because tomorrow we get to the peninsula—yippeee!
We woke to strong winds and seas of 5-7 meters, we both feel fine but many are not feeling so well. We were at sea on our way to the peninsula today. We had several talks on:
1. Mapping Antarctica
2. The Swedish Antarctica Expedition of Otto Nordenskjold and Carl Anton Larson which was a great story told by Adam
3. Edward Wilson who was a doctor and a naturalist on Scott’s missions and died with Scott on his return trip from the pole
By the afternoon the waves had moderated. There is something about the rocking motion of the ship which makes many of us, including Rick and me, tired. So we took a nap in the afternoon.
In the evening we had a DVD player installed in our cabin and watched Oceans Thirteen.
We were at sea all day today. The seas were quite rough in the morning but calmed as the day progressed. We are slightly off course in order to have a more stable ride. Our ship has stablizers which help neutralize the side to side motion but do nothing for the front to back motion. I feel much better today than I did last night but the motion of the ship made me very tired and I kept taking naps all day.
It was a day of lectures. In the morning, we had a talk on penguins and another one on glaciers. In the afternoon the lecture was about women in Antarctica.
Meanwhile it feels like we are eating continuously and burning very few calories. The decks go all the way around the ship on deck 4 (our cabin is on deck 3). I think it’s something like 13 times around make a mile. I haven’t been out walking because it’s quite windy and often raining a little.
The days get longer as we go further south. Today the sun rose at 4:45 am and set at 9:38 pm. We have strong black out curtain in our room to sleep. We also had to keep all the shades closed in S. Georgia to avoid bird strikes. There are some species who are attracted to the light. They will fly towards the lights on the ship and will die by slamming into the side of the ship.
In the evening there was a game. Each of the expedition team provide an interesting experience they had had and we had to match the experience with the team member. For instance one was “l once didn’t bath for 7 weeks.” It was fun.
Surprisingly I was tired after all my sleeping and went to bed after the game. We are headed west so we turned the clocks back an hour tonight.
We had another early morning. During the night we moved to Prion Island to see nests of the wandering albatross, the flying bird with the widest wing span in the world. It takes 14 months for these birds to fledge so they only mate once every two years. They mate for life and return every other year, to the same place they were born, to mate. They repeat their mating dance to renew their relationship. They lay just one egg and incubate it for 78 days. After the baby leaves the nest, it takes 5 years to mature and during that time it is at sea and it does not come to land.
We left the ship at 5:30 and started with shoreline cruise with Sophie, one of our kayak guides. The sun was rising and it was beautiful.
We saw lots and lots of fur seals. The fur seal population has exploded because they eat the same thing as the whales. The whale population is still recovering from being over hunted so there is lots of food in the sea. This has allowed the seals to be very successful. The babies are so curious and cute with their big eyes. We also saw birds including blue eye shags, shown here.
After about an hour we were dropped off on land and walked along a boardwalk up to nest viewing sites. Four seal babies walked in front of us for most of the way. They clearly wanted to be with us because they could have exited the boardwalk at any time. We got to the top of the hill and we saw 3 nests with the albatross incubating the egg. The male incubates first to give the female a chance to feed since she just layer the egg. It was quite foggy but here is a picture
We came back to the ship and had breakfast. While we ate, the ship moved to Salisbury plain. This is the second largest king penguin rookery, with about 100,000 breeding pairs. The king penguins do not have a mating season so they can mate at any point. As a result there are penguins at all stages of the mating process.
It is very difficult to tell the male penguins from the female penguins.Here’s an interesting fact, in the bird world if the males and female look alike they are both involved in raising the chicks, if they don’t look alike the female does most of the work raising the chicks. Here are pictures from Salisbury plain.
When we left the ship it was too windy to kayak but our kayaking guides were hopeful that the wind would die down some and we would be able to kayak. So we went ashore with our kayaking garb on. After about an hour on shore, we were informed that the kayaking was on. We were picked up by a zodiac and taken out to another zodiac which was towing the kayaks. We transferred into the kayaks and off we went. It was fun to be kayaking with the seals playing in the water and the penguin floating around like ducks. There was a spot where, according to our guide, Ewan, a fresh water stream emptied into the ocean and it was roiling with seals. Here are pictures of the seals and of penguins swimming by.
After about 45 minutes of kayaking we returned to the ship.
While we were kayaking many people saw a skua, a large predatory bird, get a penguin chick. Then the skuas fought over the chick. We heard that it was pretty gruesome.
I went up to the top deck to try to see them drag the kayaks up but they weren’t bring them up yet. They have a big crane on deck 7 that they use to raise and lower them. On the first one down and the last one up a member of the expeditionary crew rides with the zodiac and transfer into or out of the dinghy on deck 4. It’s quite a lot of work getting them up and down but they can get all 10 down in about 20 minutes.
Actually I haven’t mentioned how we load into the zodiacs yet. First of all we have to have our waterproof pants and boots on because most of the landings are wet landings and because you often get wet in the dinghies from the spray. We wear self inflating life jackets. We have to get scanned off and onto the ship. They always know exactly who is on shore and who’s on the ship. Then we have to dip our boots in biocide. Usually there are three or four people helping us get into the dinghy. Two in the dinghy and one or two on the ship. One person on the ship grabs the back of our life jacket and the optional second person takes our arm. We step onto a rubber step on the edge of the ship. Then we take an arm of the two people in the dinghy and step on to the edge of the dinghy, then to a step stool and finally onto the floor of the dinghy. One person hangs onto us until we a sitting on the edge of the dinghy. There are ropes along the edge of the dinghy to hold onto when the dinghy is moving. Then we get to shore they spin the zodiac so that the backend in against the shoreline. We slide to the back and flip our legs out, stand in the surf and walk up the beach where we take off our life jackets and stow them in bags. The life jackets are one way they make sure everyone is back on the ship. When we get back on the ship we step into a container with a rough bottom and scrub brushes on the sides to wash off our boots and then into the biocide again. They usually greet us with hot chocolate. All very efficient.
Once we were back on the ship we had lunch and after lunch we pulled anchor and headed for Antarctica.
That evening we had a auction to raise money for the S. Georgia rat eradication program. We bought a Shackleton photo printed on fabric. Overall the auction raised close to $7,000 which wasn’t even close to the record of $50,000. It was a lot of fun. Here’s a picture of a map that one of the expeditionary team member used as a canvas.
Here is a map of our stops on S. Georgia and our journey so far
During the night we moved to Gold Harbour on the south east end of S. Georgia. They are trying to make up for the two days we lost when we were stuck in the Falklands due to the storm. Therefore we were up at 4:45 and they started loading zodiacs at 5:30.
They have us divided into four groups, albatross, gentoo, king (we are kings). and petrol, for loading into the zodiacs. They can take 8 to 10 people in a zodiac, depending on the sea conditions and landing conditions, and there are about 30 people per group. Most of the time they spin the zodiacs and we get out into the surf along the back of the dinghy. They have provided us with muck boats which do a great job keeping our feet dry.
This was our first chance to really see elephant seals. It is past mating season but during mating season there are bull seals fighting for their beach real estate. We saw some juvenile males fighting, more for practice than for beach real estate. They are big animals and we stayed clear of them. Here are some pictures of elephant seals.
There is also a colony of gentoo penguins as well as a colony of king penguins. Here are pictures of gentoo with a few kings mixed in.
After walking the beach we came back to the ship for breakfast. During breakfast they moved the ship further south to Cooper Bay. This was the only stop where we would see macaroni penguins. We had the option to kayak but this would mean we would miss climbing the hill to see the macaroni. We opted not to kayak because we wanted to see the macaroni up close. Half of the passengers started by trekking up the hill to see the penguins and the other half started with a zodiac cruise. We were in the cruise group. We were lucky because our zodiac driver was Hannah, the marine mammal naturalist. We saw lots of birds as well as a female leopard seal. Hannah could tell it was a female because the females are larger than the males. The leopard seals was huge and quite curious. So curious that she bit and punctured three of the zodiacs, but not our zodiac. The zodiacs have eight air compartments so it wasn’t a big deal but interesting nonetheless. We also saw lots of macaroni penguins getting into and out of the water. Here are pictures of the macaroni penguins and the leopard seal (it was hard to get a good picture of the leopard seal because we didn’t know where she would surface.)
It was started raining while we were out. Rick didn’t want to take out his camera and my gloves were wet through. The walk up the hill was supposed to be tough in the best of conditions. After our zodiac cruise we decided not to go up the hill because we thought it would be quite slippery and muddy. A couple of people fell and one lady really hurt her knee so it was just as well we didn’t go up the hill. In the end we were disappointed that we didn’t go kayaking because everyone said it was fantastic and we didn’t end up going up the hill anyway but as my grandfather use to say that the way the peanut butter bounces.
We came back the the ship for lunch and in the afternoon we cruised down the Drygalski fjord. It was beautiful with lots of glaciers and birds, specifically prions and storm petrols. There were many water falls from the melting glaciers, some of which evaporated before hitting the ocean. At the end of the fjord there was a glacier and thousands of birds flying around at the base. Adam, our birding naturalist, said that fresh water from the melting glacier was forcing cril up to the surface of the water which was a feast for the birds. The wind in the fjord was FIERCE. It would accelerate down the side of the fjord and it was almost impossible to stand. Here are pictures from the fjord. Notice the color of the water as a result of the melting glacier.
It was interesting to watch the boat to turn in a fjord not much wider than the boat itself. The captain used the bow thrusters to pivot around and we headed towards the mouth of the fjord.
That night we headed north back to the top of the island.
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.
