The weather was against us again this morning. At 5:30am the fog was so thick you couldn’t see a thing, by breakfast at 7:30am the visibility had strengthened but a light snow had started falling. By our 9:00am launch time this turned into thick, wet snow. Luckily the anchorage at Half Moon Island was protected and it was a short tender ride in to shore. Just as I was boarding the zodiac word came from the island that an Emperor penguin had been spotted! This was extremely exciting as they are very rare this far north, their usual habit is a couple hundred miles south of here and few of the expedition staff had seen one, even fewer seeing one on land. Most of us then hurried from the landing beach up and over the snowy hill to the “emperor’s” beach. Luckily this site is frequently visited so there’s a human-made trail to follow, as well as walking on the “penguin highway”. It’s very difficult for the little guys to navigate deep snow so it’s best if we don’t trample willy-nilly through the snow creating deep pockets as they might not be able to get themselves out of our deep post holes! They’ve made their own pathways in the snow so we sticked to those unless we were interfering with their movements. This is the island, however, for Chinstrap Penguins, 3,341 nesting pairs to be exact. They’re extremely photogenic what with the contrasting black stripe under their white chins and are quite small, which makes them adorable.
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| the Emperor penguin. An adolescent far far from home |
Our intended destination after lunch was Deception Island, a volcanic caldera that’s collapsed on one side so we can cut through the narrows and cruise into a protected harbour. The volcano is still active with the last eruption in the early 1970’s which caused a mudslide which covered some of the old whaling station left on one side. The hydrothermal vents are active along the shoreline which heat up the water and that’s where the boats do their ‘polar plunge’. I say all this in the 3rd person as we pretty much saw none of this as we encountered a snow blizzard with 46 knot winds in the bay, so bad I could hardly see the ruins of the whaling station on land. Obviously a zodiac landing was impossible so we all gathered in the bar and Thomas gave an impromptu talk on the history of the island and what we should be seeing and we all drank hot tea or hot chocolate and scarfed down the huge cookies they served up. It ended up being a pleasant way to spend the afternoon.
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