Category: 2018 S. America and Antarctica trip winter

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.

Here’s the finally map of our trip.

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.