Walking on the Antarctic sea
Trip Start
Nov 06, 2009
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251
354
Trip End
May 28, 2011
Antarctic Peninsula, United States
Friday, December 10, 2010
Woke up for a wee at what I thought was the middle of the night, only to hear a couple of minutes later Julio's voice booming through the PA system. Wakey, wakey, it's 7am! Argh.
Thick ice stopped us landing at Pleneau Island, however instead the Zodiacs were dropped from the ship and we got to cruise amongst the icebergs around the island for a couple of hours.
Having indulged a tad too enthusiastically in the Polar Bear Bar the previous evening, I wasn't in the best of conditions when I stumbled into the little rubber boat. Not wanting to pollute the pristine Antarctic waters, I had to concentrate very hard on not releasing my breakfast over the side of the boat as we zipped around the frozen ice.
Fortunately they looked so stunningly beautiful, glistening in the sun and set against a gorgeous, cloudless blue sky, that I was distracted enough to keep my scrambled eggs and baked beans to myself afterall.
Some of the chunks looked like they belonged in a gallery, and were even more beautiful when decorated with penguins. We even managed to land the Zodiacs on an ice flow (a flat piece of floating ice) big enough for us to stand on. Brilliant!
We then retraced our route back through the Lemaire Channel towards Danko Island.
On the way we spotted several pods of whales, minkes and humpbacks. The Expedition crew have dubbed Minkes 'lousy minkes' as they are known for moving very fast and showing no interest in ships.
Humpbacks on the other hand are curious creatures, so the captain slowed the ship down, the whales soon began to express an interest in the boat, circling it, blowing, breaching and flipping their tails. Beautiful.
At Danko Island we hiked up a hill, threw snowballs at each other, and slid back down. we were also delighted to spot a single visiting Adelie penguin (lost?!) amongst the resident Gentoo population.
Comments
Indescriptible!!! que maravilla de fotos !!xx te adoroxxx