Elephant Island is famous historically as the place from which Ernest Shackleton set forth with 5 other men on his 800 mile open-boat journey to South Georgia to find rescue. The island is very inhospitable and it’s rare to be able to actually land ashore, which proved to be true today.
We arrived at the island just as lunch was finishing so they told us to leave the table after our main course (yes, we’re still having 4-course meals), to dress warm and head up to the bow to view the island and they’ll bring dessert up to us!
Unfortunately the fog was thick as pea soup and we couldn’t see a thing but the crew was great: tables were set up to serve us our warm chocolate bread pudding with caramel sauce and a cup of hot chocolate with a nice splash of Bailey’s, and they had music playing which had a few guests doing the Twist and Simon, the birder, stripping down to his shirt doing….well, I’m not quite sure what Simon was doing.
As we headed out the rest of Elephant Island cleared out of the fog so we at least got a quick glimpse of the unforgiving terrain and our first true sighting of the Antarctic region.
A competitive and raucous trivia contest started in late afternoon which was compromised of questions garnered from our past onboard lectures which really showed who was actually paying attention in “class”. Our team, the Growlers, were so close on so many questions but ended up square in the middle of the pack. The Def Leopard Seals squeaked out a win in a Sudden Death round. The prize was mostly bragging rights as the bottle of wine they presented wouldn’t go far in a team of 8 members!
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