Into Every Life A Little Fog Must Fall

For unfortunate reasons, yesterday turned out to be a bit of a lost day, but all’s well that ends well.

After getting up at 4am to watch the sunrise over the islands and tabular icebergs of the Antarctic Sound, we were able to enjoy spectacular views all around.  These tabular bergs are huge – probably more than 100 feet high, and a quarter mile long – or even bigger.

The ship was trying to take us through the Weddell Sea to Devil’s Island for a expedition to see Adelie penguins.   But there was too much ice.  Every so often you would hear the scraping of the ship break some ice, but last week’s ice charts no longer applied – everything had moved north.

(Wow – I’m having no luck uploading photos to the blog or Facebook – at some point I will load a whole bunch).

We stopped for a while in front of a tabular berg that had a brilliant blue section where the berg had cleaved.

Also, we spotted many Adelie penguins swimming through the water, porpoising at times – flying short distance through the air before re-entering the water.  They were often in groups of two or three, but sometimes there is a solo penguin.  Every so often we’d go past a small ice floe with a single penguin resting on it.  Or, we’d see a huge iceberg with multiple penguins hanging out on it.

Where are these penguins going?  They seem to be out in the middle of nowhere (okay, all of Antarctica is the middle of nowhere, but at least the rookeries on an island make sense!).  Are they headed for the Island of Misfit Penguins?

Fittingly, it was Penguin Awareness Day – which, until this trip, I didn’t realize was a thing.  But it is.

For those of you keeping score, we’ve now seen five types of penguins – African penguins in Cape Town, Fiordland Penguins in Milford Sound, NZ, and now Chinstraps, Gentoos, and Adelies.  Five down, 12 more to go.  (Given how scattered they all are around the Southern Hemisphere, we aren’t going to get to see all 17 in our lives.

There was also a medical emergency on board the ship, so between that and the ice, we had to turn around and went steaming toward an island with an airstrip in an attempt to medevac the patient.  The medical condition was nothing simple – and nothing that could wait.  Just before getting to the island the captain was informed the flight from Ushuaia could not come down because of the conditions.  It’s been a low sky, with lots of wind, and it won’t clear for at least three days.

Luckily our fearless leaders found a ship that was about to head back to Ushuaia.  After some lengthy negotiations, the other ship agreed to take the passenger (and his wife) back.  Let’s hope and pray he makes the journey safely.  If the other ship had not agreed to take the passenger, our trip would have been cut short and we would have had to do the Drake Passage once again.

In the meantime, as we were heading back toward the South Shetlands, I spotted a couple of Humpback Whales – which brought a lot of excitement.  I even pointed and shouted, "Thar she blows!" in the whaler tradition.  Yes, it sounded as goofy when I said it as it does right now in your mind as you imagine me saying it.  Got some good pictures of the whales diving – will post those when I can.

Around 8pm, after the couple was transferred to the other ship (much bigger than the Orion!), they decided it was too foggy for us to do an expedition to Half Moon Island, so we knocked around the ship some more.  After our early rise, Carol took a nap in the morning, and I did so in the afternoon.

The Nat Geo/Lindblad folks did the best they could to break up the monotony of another full day on the ship –they had one presentation planned for the day, but added two more.  The presentations are quite good – focusing either on history or the animals/birds down here at the End of the World.

The sea of huge tabular icebergs, the whales, and penguins were all quite neat, but people are getting a bit stir-crazy –it will be nice to head to Palmer Station today for what is supposed to be a four hour stretch on land, including a tour of the US research station and a visit to a nearby penguin rookery.