LAND HO!

(Just a reminder: green text is date, black is comments with pictures, and blue is diary text with additional comments in parentheses)

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6th, 2008

Up at 5:30 am trying not to wake Ellie. Land ho! Ice and snow with rocks peeking through. Went for coffee at 6 and heard we spotted our first iceberg at 9:40 pm last night. (There was a contest going on with many of us writing down a guess as to the time we would sight our first "real" iceberg--had to be the size of the ship to count. A young woman won the prize--a bottle of champagne--by guessing it right on the nose.) We are headed for the Aitcho Islands, where we will anchor offshore and take Zodiac rafts to land Can't wait!...

First Shore Excursion! Excellent! Not too bad down and up the gangway. I stayed dry and fairly warm except for my feet, which got a little cold after an hour. I was ashore for about an hour and a half. Saw lots of gentoo and chinstrap penguins, also petrels, skuas, and sheathbills (the last three all birds). The chinstraps are brave and come closest, one came about 3 feet away from me. I spent a lot of time sitting, but no babies came to me. (One guy had several of them climbing all over him. I accused him of using fish-scented aftershave.)

Penguin in center right foreground is a "gentle gentoo", most of whom were pretty much sitting around molting (the adults). You can id gentoos by the white slash above their eyes. The guy on his right is a chinstrap, identifiable by the black line which stretches from "ear to ear" under their chins, hence the name. The chinnies were very busy, hustling back and forth from the ocean. In this picture you can probaby tell the gentoo is "parked" and the chinny is on the march!

This is a typical nest, abandoned now that the chicks are all hatched and about half grown. The only nesting materials available are pebbles, so that's what they use. (Remember in the movie "Happy Feet" where the penguin guru had a huge mountain of pebbles? "Good" pebbles are apparently the equivalent of penguin wealth, and they will sometimes swipe pebbles from other nests. The chinnies are particularly adept pebble thieves, we were told.) The "pretty" star shaped pattern around the nest is penguin guano. While nesting, they simply rise up and squirt, making this characteristic pattern. Penguin guano is extremely smelly, and we could smell the island well before we landed on it. After a few minutes our noses became accustomed. However, all the outer clothes I wore had to be carefully packed separately to keep all my luggage from smelling like a penguin rookery.

This is a pretty good shot of the Zodiacs, taken from Aitcho. The floating ice in the foreground is called "brash ice". The ice is given different names, based on size, shape, and location. Pieces bigger than this, about the size of a car (there are a few in the background), are called "growlers". The next largest size, but not huge, are called "bergie bits", and the truly large ones are icebergs. Only about 15% of the ice is above the water, so even the growlers can be treacherous. I read that hitting a growler is what caused the damage to the cruise ship that sank in this area in Nov.

If I were more adept at this blog stuff I would upload a map of Antarctica for reference. But if you've got a globe or world map, you can see that Antarctica is shaped somewhat like a mushroom tilted a little to the right or east, with the peninsula coming off to the upper left, or west side. Off the northern and western edge of the peninsula are a number of small islands, including the Aticho Islands, which are technically part of the South Shetland Islands. There are so many of these that many don't have individual names. The continent itself is huge, larger than the continental US, and contains about 80% of the earth's fresh water in the form of ice, some of which is many thousands of years old. Part of the interior of the continent lies below sea level and is covered by ice up to over a mile thick.

I didn't risk the trek (up an icy ridge and down the other side to the beach on the other side of the island) to see the elephant seals--steep and icy--discretion is the better part of valor. Don't want to fall first day ashore.

Back aboard, hungry and thirsty. Hot tea tastes great. Lunch isn't for 2 more hours. I may need some raisins.

10:30 am I sent an email to the Fab 4 (my great, good friends), Patrick (my nephew) and Judy and Stan (my buddies from church)--hope it gets through. (We had to set up individual email accounts and were charged so much per message based on the length. Very reasonable.)

Lunch was prawns, salad, veggies, and blueberry crepe. At about 1:30 pm they announced the visabilty conditions were extraordinary, enabling us to see the Antarctic continent, some 100 nautical miles away to the east, (which, if my math is correct, is about 115 statute miles), across the Bransfield Strait. We are sailing past Greenwich Island and the Livingston Islands on our way to Deception Island and our second shore trip. I geared up and went out and the view was spectacular. Some 115 miles distant are the mountains of the mainland!

Another briefing due at 2:30 pm. Passed through "Neptune's Belows", the narrow gap at the opening to the caldera of Deception Island, a volcano last active in 1970, and also one of the South Shetland Islands. Got all geared up for the shore trip, but there was a delay of over half an hour (due to problems with the cranes lowering the Zodiacs). I got hot and tired and my back was aching, so I decided to chuck this one for a nap. No wild life here, just barren volcanic ash, and, of course, the "Polar Plunge", which I had already decided not to do after hearing in the briefing that the water is NOT warm. Ellie did go in and verified the water was COLD!

Had a lovely nap and a shower and washed my hair and ready for dinner at 7:30 pm. Some sort of beef dish, very good, salad, soup, and blueberries over ice cream.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7th

"Slept in" until 7:30 am and did not go on the 5:30 am shore excursion. Two more today will be enough.

12 Noon: Just back from Danco Island. Gentoos, sheathbills, some petrels, and gorgeous scenery, especially icebergs. Zodiac trip took a short tour around icebergs and we saw a Weddell seal, sunning himself on an ice floe. Got several good pics of him.

Me on Danco Island, sitting on part of the remains of an old station, Argentinian I think. (They had to close several of their stations due to financial problems in their economy.) Note the whale vertebrae. Many of the islands are littered with whalebones from the days when whaling processing was done on shore before the factory ships became common.

This is an Antarctic sheathbill, the only land-based bird in the Antarctic. (Note the feet are not webbed.) Penguins and the other bird species here only come ashore to breed and nest, and spend the remainder of their lives at sea or in the air.

Sheathbills look like large white pigeons. The part of the face around the bill has no feathers, since it has to be washed often due to their rather nasty eating habits. They are scavengers, and forage through penguin guano seeking undigested bits of krill, etc. They also follow the adult penguins around as they feed their chicks, hoping for a bit of dropped partially digested food that the adult penguins regurgitate for their young. They will also feed on dead birds and animals, sort of like vultures. No wonder they have to wash their faces often.

This little guy walked within a couple of feet of me. It's an adult gentoo. We saw gentoos on nearly every landing, as their numbers are high and growing, primarily because the krill population thrives because of the drastic reduction in the number of baleen whales to eat it. Nice for the penguins. Not nice for the whales.

Harvest of krill for human consumption is becoming more common. The more of us there are on earth, the less of everything else there will be. Will we someday have to resort to eating one another? (Shades of "Soylent Green"!)

This is the Weddell seal, sunning himself. They are named after James Weddell, a British whaler who was first to explore some of these waters. The Weddell Sea, on the west side of the peninsula and northwest edge of the continent, is also named for him. The seal was pretty unconcerned as we cruised by, but eventually got enough of us and slipped off into the sea.

The Orlova is 90 meters in length, not quite the length of a football field, so you can get some idea of the grandeur of the scenery.

In this picture, taken from Danco Island, she is anchored between an island and an iceberg, and not as close to either as it looks. Distances are deceiving here, because the air is crystal clear, which is why we could see the mainland from over 100 miles away. Because it never got fully dark at night, we could not see a starry night sky, which I'm sure would be spectacular, with the colorful southern lights and blazing stars. Alas, this occurs only in winter, when conditions are not favorable for tourists. In winter the area where we are crusing now will be solid pack ice.

The berg on the right is just one example of the colorful designs Mother Nature creates as the ice slithers down a glacier or partially melts in the seawater until it rolls over. The guides knew all the characteristic signs and could tell which markings were from ground slide, and which occured as the berg eroded under water until it flipped over, and so on. As I recall, the ridges on this one are from water running down as the ice melted over time. Because of the variations, it appears this berg has flipped over at least once, accounting for the differences in texture. Some of the bergs look like they are made from styrofoam; others look like they were scooped up from a Dairy Queen. No two looked alike, and the shapes are more beautiful and amazing than any human sculptor could form.

Another example of a beautiful berg. The various shades of blue occur because of the pressure of the ice when it's still in the glacier. The pressure is so great that it forces the ice to compress until the only part of the color spectrum from which light can escape to be visible is the blue end. This results in amazing colors ranging from deep to light blue. The irregular shape of this berg also suggests it has rolled over at least once. Remember, only 15% of the berg is above water. The enormous flat topped bergs are called "tabular icebergs", and some of them are several miles in length.

After lunch we landed at Neko Harbour and actually set foot on the Antarctic continent for the first time. I was awestruck. There just aren't words to describe this. Penguins again, gentoos again, and lots of friendly young ones. Also skuas and a Weddell seal stretched out for a nap. I heard the nearby glacier calving but didn't see it because it was hidden from my view by the Argentinian rescue shelter nearby. Took lots of penguin photos and video and then back to the Zodiac and off in search of a humpback whale which had been sighted from the ship earlier. We found him! He put on a show for 30 mintues. It was snowing and we were all cold but no one wanted to leave. Gorgeous icebergs and mountains, rapidly being obscured by the falling snow.

This was taken ashore on the continent at Neko Harbour. If you look closely you can see the young penguins, many of whom are lying down asleep. Their main "job" at this point is to eat and grow so they can fledge fully feathered to the sea before winter sets in. The adults are molting, as I mentioned, and don't eat or move around much during this time. We were cautioned not to disturb the molting adults, since this is a stressful time for them anyway. Sometimes it was difficult to maintain the "15 foot rule", trying not to come within 15 feet of the wildlife. More often than not there were so many and they were so spread out it was hard to move around without walking closer than 15 feet. If we had to do so, we moved very slowly and made no sudden movements to disturb them. Note the pinish tinge on the snowy slope above. This is from an algae that grows on the snow. One of my fellow travelers argued with me that it was penguin guano, but one of the tour staff verified it was algae. So there!

This is another lucky guy with chicks in his lap, fluffy penguin chicks, that is. I hope you can see them. He's in the exact center of the picture, sitting down, and babies are in front of him and actually in his lap! He was grinning like a fool and I don't blame him a bit! You can see lots more babies in the background on the left.

Bergs, particulary bergie bits and growlers, often are stranded ashore with the tide. Then as they slowly melt, they form wondrous shapes, such as this one.

Here's the humpback we found on the Zodiac cruise. (The dark spot in the center of the picture.) I have several shots of just a bit of whale showing but I chose to post this one which includes the distant Zodiac and the tip of ours to give you an idea of his size and how close he was to us. It was really hard to catch most of his activity with a still camera, but I got a lot of really neat video of his movements, surfacing to blow, doing shallow dives showing his hump, as in this shot, and even some showing of his beautiful fluke. Whales' flukes are like fingerprints in humans, no two alike, so careful photographs and descriptions help scientists track their movements. Humpbacks are known for being curious and "friendly" toward ships and rafts. He was large enough to easily topple all of us into the frigid ocean, but we felt no fear of him, only palpable excitement because of his presence. From his behavior it was pretty obvious he knew we were there and he moved leisurely back and forth between the three Zodiacs near him. It was as if he wanted to give all of us equal opportunities to see him and take his picture! (I refer to the whale as "he", but in truth whales are very difficult to sex, since you have to see their bellies and look for specific rather small orifices, clearly not an easy thing to do in the open sea.)

This is a shot of something we saw often. These are penguins at sea, "porpoising", a swimming behavior where they rapidly move through the water, alternately surfacing and doing shallow dives in groups. They could have been feeding on krill, but our Zodiac driver said it was more likely they were just "playing". Seeing them move about on land with their endearing, clumsy waddles is very different from watching them in the water, where they are graceful to the max. Through evolution they have adapted their wings, bodies and feet so that they do indeed "fly", they just do it in a different medium, water instead of air.

Another beautiful berg. I don't think it's readily apparent from this picture that by this time it was snowing fairly heavily, the only day that it snowed on us during the trip. This area routinely receives less than two inches of precipitation annually, so we were actually lucky to see some of it.

Returned to ship finally for a quick recap and briefing for tomorrow's activities. Then a special supper: a BBQ on the deck! In the snow! We bundled up and had soup, huge pretzels, beef, lamb, sausage, chicken, salads, green beans, corn on the cob, beer, wine and cookies or baked apple for dessert. I had the baked apple with vanilla sauce and it was all very good. The snow was still coming down hard and I noticed beautiful flakes landing on my dark pink parka. I took off my bright red muffler and laid it out on the table, and several of us ooh'd and aah'd over the snowflakes as they landed on the red fleece, each one a momentary jewel and thing of beauty. A wonderful memory.

They are showing "Happy Feet" tonight, but since I've seen it I'm going to get ready for bed and read.

Enough for today. Next post: Port Lockroy and the only "souvenir shop" on the Peninsula!