The one day I didn’t get up early there were tons of icebergs passing by our ship! Normally I’m up at least an hour or more before our wake up PA announcement but this morning I thought I’d try to go back to sleep to pass the time. And this is what I was missing:
During the night we had repositioned to the tip of the peninsula and our morning stop was Kinnes Cove. This was a zodiac cruise and we were warned that it was cold, to wear everything we had! That meant 3 pairs of socks, 4 layers on the bottom, 6 on top, and 3 hats for our 2 hour cruise. I felt like a stuffed sausage and it was very difficult to bend over to put my boots on! I’m going to have to cut down on the buffets!! I never did learn the actual temperature but the wind made it positively frigid. I did well until the end when my toes and fingers got a little chilled, but nothing too bad. The highlights of this stop was seeing the Adelie penguins, a couple of crab eater seals, and the many icebergs. Julia the lovely fiddler greeted us as we returned onboard with delicious cups of hot lentil soup! This crew really is spectacular.
Lunch was an easy burger buffet, followed by a nice 2 hour cruise to our next would-be landing site: Brown Bluff, but as is typical in the Antarctic anything can happen. Here the sea ice was so thick it was blocking our access to shore. Nate and the captain had a quick discussion and decided to try another site so we steamed to Active Sound where we encountered katabatic winds gusts of up to 50 knots! The winds may be light on one side of the mountain but as they are pushed up and over the top, the differing pressures between the cold air above and the warmer below cause the wind speed to increase exponentially. Obviously this was too dangerous so we continued on to an unknown site on Joinville Island.
Nate had a compendium of scientific research done on wildlife colony counts throughout the Antarctic so he knew there were penguins somewhere on this coast so with some good scouting skills and luck we found what we are calling Nate’s Landing. Herewithto unvisited by any excursion vessel before, we first cruised by the face of a nearby glacier, then landed at an icy, rocky beach that was dotted with Gentoo and Adelie rookeries. It was hard to take a bad picture as the penguins either sat on their eggs in their rocky nests or set about tending to their nests. They are constantly building up their nests to protect their eggs from melting snow so they’re on the constant hunt for just the right sized rock, even if it means stealing it from another nest! Those birds not breeding were busy, busy marching somewhere. Up & down the rocky coast, even high up the snowy cliff they’d march on some little mission.
We didn’t return to the ship until 7:00 pm so it was a bit of a rush to get to dinner at 7:30pm but it was nice actually not to have to wait long because no matter how much we eat, we’re almost always hungry! It was a passenger’s birthday so the penguin express delivered a birthday cake!
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