Conditions were once again ideal for an otherwise tricky landing so we had another 4:45am wake up call to catch the early morning light at St. Andrew’s Bay. At 5am a light breakfast of coffee, fruit, croissants and cereal was served in the bar with a 5:30am boat launch time. The promise of the morning sun quickly faded into a grayish day so I dawdled a bit to once again avoid the crush in the Mud Room. 82 people bumping into each other while trying to put on their clumsy boots and tight-fitting life jacket make it a bruising scramble, and as the light wasn’t as good it wasn’t a hurry for me to get ashore.
St. Andrews is not regularly visited due to its’ swell but it’s magical when seen due to its gazillion King penguins. Generally it’s just the nesting pairs that are counted (60,000) so when you throw in the juveniles and the babies it could even reach as high as 500,000 total penguins. Elephant seals dotted the beach and as you never want to get between them and the sea upon landing we headed straight for its inland edge, then turned left to parallel along it to the small hills at the far end to view the parents and growing chicks.
The chicks are born in February but need 11 months to grow before taking their first swim so the large fluffy brown birds we saw are still totally reliant on their parents for food. They herd together in large numbers in what’s called a crèche for protection from the skua birds and other predators and their parents have to search the masses to find their baby. They speak and call each other in their unique voices until they find each other so the air was filled with chirps and squeaks and trumpet calls. We watched as they pestered their parent (the mom and dad share the feeding duties) with nips and squawks until they coughed up a meal!
Gail was on one of the last boats to return to the ship and hers was the most exciting of the trips – they got swamped trying to leave the beach! The boat got turned sideways a bit and a big wave came in over the stern knocking her and another passenger to the floor of the boat and her lifejacket inflated in the foot and a half of water swirling around the bottom. Luckily she wasn’t hurt nor any camera equipment damaged but some other guests had not put their gear away properly and some was ruined! The staff had warned us that everything should always be tucked away in waterproof bags when aboard but it’s easy to become lackadaisical about it.
Our lesser excitement was seeing a couple of leopard seals prowling around a rocky point covered in penguins. Leopard seals are quite vicious hunters, there’s reports of them even tracking humans from under the ice, but besides giving us a good look over, these guys were more interested in catching a penguin unfortunate enough to go for a swim. In fact, we did see half of a penguin pelt floating in the water. The leopard seal grabs its prey and shakes it so violently it rips apart and the seal then eats it from the inside out. Luckily, or not, we didn’t see that!
The kitchen staff had a wonderful big breakfast buffet with fresh croissants, mini quiches, eggs, and lox & bagels, fruit, etc. for us at 10:30am and that set us up nicely for a well-looked forward to nap while the ship repositioned for our next excursion.
Afternoon Tea was a substantial savory one as we didn’t have lunch: 5 kinds of soup, pizza rolls, and leftover wedding cake; then a 2:45pm call to the boats. They had hoped to do a shore excursion to see the nesting Macaroni penguins but the fur seals on the landing beach at Cooper Bay were too aggressive so the plans morphed into a zodiac cruise. Gail, Sheila and I were quite happy to have Nate as our zodiac driver as we had full confidence in his tender driving, he’s a wealth of knowledge having been here loads of times, and he’s a happy chappy to boot.
Our time in South Georgia was now at an end and the captain turned the ship south-southwest during dinner and we started making our way to Antarctica. The winds were picking up, the swells were greater and we were already seeing big icebergs that had already made the years-long voyage from there, a trip we hope will only take 2.5 days. We could barely keep our eyes open after a delicious clafoutis dessert so it was right to our cabins for an early bedtime.
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