Feb 13 - Feb 17, 2009

Friday – February 13, 2009

The last blog was written when I was very tired and not putting all my thoughts into the blog. When describing the room at the Radisson in Santiago, I also meant to convey the fact that it was so much nicer that camping or sleeping in the car.

Today we flew from Santiago to Ushuaia, and after being driven to Tierra del Fuego National Park (and the very end of the Pan American highway, we boarded a catamaran for lunch and the short voyage via the Beagle Channel back to the National Geographic Explorer.

Then it was find our cabin, take everything out of the suitcases and get organized in the cabin. This was much nicer to do with only myself in the cabin. This was followed by ‘an abandon ship drill’ with parkas, headgear, etc., including life vests. Cocktail hour (yes they have soft drinks on board), followed by dinner, and now it is time for bed and I hope catching up on much needed sleep.

We should be in Drake Passage around midnight, and for the next 36 we will be in the Drake Passage on our way to Antarctica. I’ve got the patch on, and haven’t felt bad at all, but it is only an hour or two before being in much rougher seas. I can feel the ship moving much more than an hour ago, but all is still good.

Saturday- February 14, 2009

As we moved further into the Drake Passage, things got very dicey for me. In fact, this Valentine’s Day is one I would like to forget. Simply put, I was exhausted from throwing up all day. If I wasn’t doing that I was sleeping the rest of the time. A pretty miserable day. The only good news was that there really wasn’t anything much to see. The bad news was to most people who had been here before (and there are a lot of them on this trip) they all said the passage was very calm.

Sunday – February 15, 2009

I’m still alive!

Hopefully the worst is over. I have actually eaten a little breakfast and lunch, and the food is still staying inside me. We have spotted land just before lunch and the hope is that we will land in the Zodiacs around 2 PM on Barrientos Island. The island is too small to develop a permanent ice cap, so here we will have open ground from which to observe chinstrap and gentoo penguin colonies, as well as: predatory skuas (birds who prey on the young penguins and penguin eggs, as well as other birds and their eggs) and seals. And we will be on solid land. There were many gentoos and chinstraps present upon landing from the mother ship to the zodiacs, in the hundreds of each species. They were very curious, and while we were told to stay at least 15 feet away, if they approached us, which they did, then it was OK to stand your ground (as they would come up to you and peck at whatever interested them. For some reason they thought my knee pad was something to sink there beak into.

At one point one of the naturalists was explaining why some penguins were chasing another. It was the baby’s attempt to get the mother to regurgitate more food into their gullet. So my natural reply, which was voted the best one-liner of the day: ‘If I’d been here yesterday I could have fed at least 20 penguins. Okay, it sounded better in context.

Monday – February 16, 2009

Today was a day filled with sunshine. The mountainous terrain looked great, there were plenty of penguins (gentoo, chinstrap and Adeleis ), as well as whales (humpback and minke), leopard seals, and the crazed skuas. Skuas are aggressive birds that will attack your head, sometimes with reason if you are, in their opinion, to close to their nest, and other times just ’for the hell of it’. I was bombarded by a pair of them, and these are big and powerful birds, about 10 times. It was tough to keep them away from my head when the pair would attack from two sides simultaneously. Fortunately I had a hiking pole to wave them off.

We have traveled through Errera Channel and landed on Cuverville Island, and later through Paradise Bay, followed by cruising through the Gerlache Strait before sailing through the Lemaire Channel and landing on Booth Island (our most southern latitude – around 65 degrees south). This means we did not quite reach the Antarctic Circle (which is between 66 and 67 degrees south Latitude). I’m not sure why I’m spelling this all out because I can’t find these places named on the maps I’ve seen on board.

The bad news is that I probably won’t be posting any photographic images to the blog. The internet service on board is expensive and slow. If I find I’m not using all my minutes later in the voyage, I’ll do some posting of images from here.

So far all the landings we have made have been on islands, not on the Antarctic mainland. That will change with tomorrow.

Tuesday – February 17, 2009

As I write this just before lunch, I have returned from Port Lockroy and Jougla Pt. (yes, another island) where I saw blue-eyed shags (another form of cormorants) with very fluffy down chicks. There were also gentoo penguins with fluffy chicks (some too young for this time of year) and gentoos sitting on nests with an egg that either was infertile or froze or was in some way compromised. And the young gentoos would just walk right up to you and clasp their beaks around your finger in the hope that some food would be inserted in their gullet. The other thing about gentoo penguin colonies is the constant noise. And the really scary thing is that we are all getting used to the smell of penguin poop….

I want to get this off before we go kayaking in Neko Harbor. As soon as I wrote this, the winds picked up like you wouldn’t believe – from around 10 knots to between 85 and 92 knots. Our plans for Neko Harbor were eliminated. As we were somewhat exposed to the wind, you could feel the ship start to bob and weave like a punch drunk fighter. The captain took us to Paradise Cove were the winds were calm. We hiked through snow for a view of the Bay, then took zodiac rides around the bay where we came within 5 feet of a leopard seal on an ice flow, and watched an iceberg split in half and roll over, which is the reason the zodiacs never get to close to these things as they could easily turn the zodiacs over.

NOTE: The posts will be few and far between. The internet is slow and expensive, and I even had problems getting this to blog. If I can’t get pictures into the blog from here, they will have to be entered when I return home.