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.