Day 6: Morning on Horseshoe Island

April 2, 2015

Day 6, still south of the circle. Our third day of doing landings.

Keeping the deck clean. I was out on deck a little earlier than usual this morning. Before we got to Antarctica, I had thought I would be up super early to take pictures, or even get up in the middle of the night to see the stars. But as excited as I was to see and photograph it all, I was exhausted at the end of each day, so I never woke up before the wake-up call each morning, which came 30 minutes before breakfast. (The time of breakfast varied depending on the day’s plans.)

So anyway, this was the only day I caught anyone cleaning the decks.

The first zodiac full of passengers heads to our morning landing site. This site had tighter restrictions on how many people could be on land at once, so they took us in two waves. Allen, Jeff & I were in the second wave.

The views from the ship were amazing as always.

This morning we were venturing to Horseshoe Island in Marguerite Bay, home of a British research base that had been abandoned in 1960. It was left basically as they’d left it in 1960–magazines & food & all.

This site had a guest book we could sign.

Fun fact: Buildings in Antarctica are never locked, in case anyone has emergency need for shelter.

That paper posted on the wall says at the top: “HOW TO BAKE ABOUT 9 LBS OF BREAD.”

This bright green is copper that’s been exposed and oxidized. It was in rocks all over the island.

Guess who!

More of the oxidized copper

We saw a few seals around the island.

But these were the only two penguins (Adelies) that we saw this morning. Mostly we were too far south for penguins.

This was one of the zodiac rides where I decided to take my chances and keep a camera out, because we’d gone through some really cool ice on the way to land.

This was also the zodiac ride where we had to get towed in. And sitting at the front of our zodiac you can see a piece of ice that Jimmy had collected. They melted this and auctioned off the glacier water at the end of the trip.

The ice was right there.

By the way this also reminds me that in the middle of the night on the ship, you could hear the ship hitting and scraping ice in the water. It was a little disconcerting, but I just told myself that it must be normal because I heard it a lot and nothing bad ever seemed to happen.

And thus ended the morning. Then it was time to eat lunch as we headed to our next landing site, which is where we surprised the Chileans.

Day 5: Zodiac cruise

March 31, 2015

After we had sailed south of the circle, we were hoping to do a landing at Detaille Island, but there turned out to be too much ice to reach it. So instead, we dropped anchor near there in Crystal Sound and did some scenic cruising in the zodiacs after brunch.

We spent about an hour and a half cruising around among the ice and the wildlife. The weather was perfect, with blue skies and very little wind.

Inside the zodiac. Adrian the bird expert was driving it, and you can see his camera is out and sitting on his bag next to him. That’s how I knew it was safe to get out my camera.

Arches in the ice look really cool, but they aren’t safe to sail under because they could collapse at any time.

Quark had hired this French videographer, Hugo, to record some promo videos during our expedition. By the end of the trip, he had already put together a first cut of his video, and they showed it to us on the last night. It was awesome! It will eventually be online.

He got to go out in his own zodiac to get the footage he wanted.

Our ship and some other zodiacs in the distance

Fur seal, looking to me a lot like a wet rat

Crabeater seals, which aren’t found much farther north than this

Whales will come up to pieces of ice like this and try to knock the seal (or seals) off by diving under one edge of the ice and coming up to rock it. We didn’t witness this on this trip, but the guides told us they’d seen a group of whales work together for quite a while to rock a seal off the ice. (And sometimes the seal still manages to get away.)

Cauliflower iceberg?

We were able to get pretty close in our zodiacs…I shot these seals with my 24-70mm lens, not the long telephoto.

Approaching the ship at the end of the zodiac cruise. You can see the zodiac ahead of us unloading.

We’d been hoping to sail through a very narrow channel called the Gullet that afternoon. Alex had told us the night before that they’d been unable to see the area from the satellite photos from the past week because it had been cloudy, so they weren’t sure how much ice there was. He’d warned that there was a good chance that it would be choked with ice and we wouldn’t be able to get through, but we were going to try anyway.

And as it turned out, once we got there, there was, in fact, too much ice. We were still heading further south, but now we had to go out and around some islands, so we did not have an afternoon landing this day while we were repositioning.

When he made this announcement over the PA system, I was a little relieved, actually, because I was so freaking exhausted; I just wanted a nap. (But I didn’t want to miss anything! It was so hard to decide to sleep!) We had a light lunch at 2 in the afternoon, and then I headed to my cabin to sleep. Allen was in there resting, too, and as I stripped down to just one layer of long underwear, I said to him, “Since I’m taking all this off, something exciting is bound to happen outside.” Sure enough, about a minute after I’d crawled under the covers, Alex came over the PA system to announce that we were about to pass by a particularly impressive iceberg that we would not want to miss, and in fact the captain was going to circle around it 360 degrees so we could get the best possible views. I said, “I KNEW IT!” But I stayed in bed. I hated to miss it but I was so, so tired.

I basically slept the rest of the night. I woke up and went to dinner but after dinner I went right back to bed and slept until the morning wake-up call. I don’t know what was happening on the rest of the ship, but I needed that sleep.

The next day…the farthest point south we would go. But first…I think I’ll write about how the zodiacs worked.

Day 5: Crossing the Circle

March 29, 2015

The day we crossed the circle! We were all excited–passengers and crew alike, because it was the crew’s first crossing this season. Earlier in the season there is too much ice to get this far south. (Plusses to going in February–less ice and lots of whale activity.)

On this morning, we woke up to clear blue skies and bright sunshine. The night before, Alex had told us we expected to cross the Antarctic Circle–at 66 degrees (hence the name of this blog) and 33 minutes–at about 8am, so they would be holding breakfast until after so we could all be out on the deck for it. But during the wake-up call at 7:30, Alex reported that we’d been slowed down by ice overnight, so we would not reach the circle until about 8:45am. They would continue to hold breakfast and do a celebratory brunch after we crossed.

I was up on deck by 8am.

There was a little bit of snow from the night before.

More people started heading outside as the we approached the circle. The captain announced that we were fifteen minutes from crossing. Then five minutes. Then one minute! He joked, “You all see that dotted line, right?” Then he counted down: “10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1!” And he blew the ship’s horn a couple of times, and everyone cheered.

And then the next thing we knew, a bunch of the expedition team were running out in costumes and demanding that we deliver our leader to them.

That would be Alex, who came out down from where he’d been on the bridge and is kneeling here. First they poured (cold) sea water on his head, then they made him kiss a krill (a stuffed animal version), and then they smeared “penguin poop” on his forehead.

After they were done with Alex, they invited all of us to join too.

Jeff having water poured over his head. You can see the krill in someone’s hand, too.

The “penguin poop” smear

They also gave us shots of vodka after. As my fellow traveler Kristine said, “Every time I do something stupid on this trip, they give me vodka.” (We would get shots of vodka following the polar plunge, too.)

There was also a flag that showed the date we crossed, but I somehow missed this entirely and didn’t get a photo with it like many people did. They auctioned it off later at the end of the trip.

Meanwhile, my Uncle Allen had another idea. In 1999 he biked from Dayton, Ohio, to the Arctic Circle in Alaska, which took two months. He has a photo of himself biking across the circle there, so when we spotted a couple of bikes stored in an out-of-the-way spot on the ship, he decided to bike across the Antarctic Circle, too. That was an unexpected bonus! (Next up: biking across the equator?)

Eventually it was time for breakfast, and then we hoped to have a landing on Detaille Island, but it was not to be. Scenic cruising instead!

Day 4, evening: The Lemaire Channel

March 26, 2015

It is STILL our first day actually in Antarctica, and we’re not done yet. Around 9pm, we were approaching the Lemaire Channel, a narrow channel that’s 7 miles long and a little less than a mile wide at its narrowest point.

Everyone was outside on the decks, cameras in hand, as we approached the entrance. The entrance is between those two mountains in the photo below.

It was sailing through here that we saw a huge chunk of glacier calve, falling into the water.

At some point, the Quark team brought out hot chocolate with Bailey’s for everyone, but I didn’t get any photos of that.

And then the most incredible part–a minke whale breaching, which, according to Jimmy the whale guy, is extremely rare.

And then he did it a second time!

Icebergs were like clouds, in that you could always see shapes & objects in them. I thought this one looked like a soft-serve ice cream cone.

It took about an hour or so to sail the whole length of the channel, and by the end the light was fading.

Around 10pm I went inside the ship and spent some time downloading my memory cards from the day. I couldn’t believe that we’d been there just one day so far…we’d already done and seen so much. It felt like much longer. (And I was, by the way, really, really tired.) Totally epic first day.

Next up in the morning…crossing the Antarctic Circle.

Day 4, afternoon: Two landings in one

March 25, 2015

For the afternoon landings, we had another choice to make. We could do a landing at Port Lockroy only, a landing at both Damoy Point and Port Lockroy, or a landing with a long hike at Damoy Point, followed by a shorter visit to Port Lockroy. The two sites are right next to each other. Port Lockroy is on a very small island–it includes a gift shop, a small museum, and a post office. Because it’s so small, they had to control the crowds so all 100+ of us weren’t there at the same time.

My uncle (looking up and waving here) headed out on a zodiac.

Jeff in his gear for our zodiac ride. The blue life vest apparently inflates automatically upon hitting the water. We never saw this in action, luckily.

The afternoon started out very foggy. Jeff & I had chosen to do the hike at Damoy Point, so we started there.

A fur seal was hanging out near our landing point.

It started to clear up a little as we got to the top of the glacier we were hiking on.

This is Tom, who takes even more pictures than I do.

The fog started to lift just in time for everyone to take photos before starting back down.

You can see the line of yellow penguins at Port Lockroy…they are non-native but still pretty interesting. This is looking down from the glacier on Damoy Point.

I took a picture of white.

Back at the bottom of the glacier was an old hut that was built in 1973 but hasn’t been used since 1993. It still contains scientific equipment and various artifacts.

Back outside I came across this egg as I hiked back toward the landing site.

A penguin headed toward our path.

But instead of crossing the path, he turned and started to hike with us!

By the time I got back to the zodiac boarding site, there was actual blue sky showing.

We were then ferried by zodiac over to Port Lockroy.

Remember the rule about staying at least 5 meters away from penguins? This island is so small and there are so many penguins that it’s not possible to do that here. But there are footpaths from the landing spot up to the building, so you pretty much just stay on those and try not to disturb any penguins too much.

The museum, gift shop, and post office are inside this building.

Mailing a letter at the post office. It takes 6-8 weeks for them to arrive.

You can also get your passport stamped here. It’s just for fun, of course, since Antarctica is not a country, but who doesn’t want a penguin in their passport?? Since Quark was holding our passports, they handled having them stamped for us. (And they’d provided a signup sheet where you could indicate if you did not want yours stamped.)

Leave your bag on the path, it gets snuggled by a penguin chick.

And then it was time to get back on the zodiac and head back to the ship.

It was nearly 7pm by the time we got back to the ship, and the day wasn’t over. We still had the re-cap, dinner, and sailing through the Lemaire Channel on tap for the night.

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