Further musings and more pictures

The trip home from Cape Town, South Africa, to New York City, stopped at Dakar, Senegal, for refueling and a change of crew. Here is the interesting thing about security here - a good thing in my opinion. We stayed on the plane, and many individuals from security came through, cleaning up the plane from those who left here, and others who did the following: they took apart every seat on the airplane looking for, I assume weapons or explosives that could have been left behind by those who left the airplane. They also made each of us identify all carry on bags that were ours. Every bag was thus owned by someone on the airplane, and not something left behind by a previous passenger.

The pictures here come from Cuverville Island and Lemaire Channel (which is along the western edge of the long thin part of Antarctica that reaches out to South America. We did not get below the Antarctic Circle (which is at 66degrees 33 minutes South). We only got to 65 degrees plus South - not quite there. The Lemaire Channel is one mile wide and seven miles long with numerous icebergs (although not as many as earlier in the season) to make our way around. At times it seemed like we were running left or right and then quickly reversed directions in order to not hit the bigger ones.








Above - Antarctica


Above - Gentoos on Cuverville Island



On Left - Molting Gentoo on Cuverville Island















On right - Marching Gentoos on Cuverville I.








On Left - Iceberg (you don't want these things rolling over (as they are prone to do) when you are real close in the zodiacs - it happened once to me on a smaller berg)






On Right - National Geographic Explorer in Lemaire Channel from zodiac











On Left - Whale Diving in Lemaire Channel (we never did see any breaching)






On Right - Lemaire Channel



I am still only on images from Monday, February 16, 2009, so there are a lot more pictures to come. We got to Cape Town on March 9th.