Kayaking Antarctica (Well, Not The Whole Continent, Just Part)

After the fast ice walk, and before the polar plunge, we went kayaking around the ice floes and bergy bits in the afternoon.

As someone who has fallen in love with kayaking in the last few years (I have two, and it is an unusual trip out on the Potomac where I don’t see multiple bald eagles and many osprey), I was quite keen to do it at the bottom of the world, so I had asked our expedition leader a couple days earlier when he asked for questions when we were kayaking.  He gave me grief for being impatient, so, in announcing the kayaking, he said, “This announcement is for Glen.”  I will point out that, as of Sunday morning, no one else has had their own announcement.  (Of course, what does that say about me?)

We went over in the zodiac boats to a “platform” that the expedition team made off a large ice floe.  We scooted our bodies from one zodiac to another, where we were given a device that automatically sends our location to the ship’s bridge and to the expedition team if we fall in the water.  The good news, we did not have to use it.  The bad news is. . .well, there is no bad news (vultures!  Hoping that someone else would fall in!).

So then we carefully scooted into the kayak.  They are two person, inflatable kayaks with foot pedals for the rudder.  We were advised not to use the rudder, but unfortunately it was set to turn us left.  We kept going left, as I backpaddled to turn us right.  I felt foolish – first blaming Carol’s paddling for pushing us left (well, I knew it couldn’t be my fault, of course), then doubting my own yaking skills.  Finally I realized that the darn rudder was doing it.  I used the foot pedals to straighten out the kayak, and everything was smooth sailing (paddling) after that.

We paddled around a bunch of ice floes, going up to some bright blue bergy bits as well.  I dubbed one ice formation the kissing seals (because they look like kissing seals, duh!).  Meanwhile, a small (relatively speaking) iceberg had drifted closer, so we paddled over near it, enjoying listening to the waves lapping at the berg, ever changing it.

Huge tabular bergs were off in the distance.  We had been warned not to go over them, but they were so far away there is no way we would have gotten there and back in 45 minutes (plus, Carol would not have let me).

We were able to get back easily to the platform, transferred, and off on the Zodiac we went, back to the ship.