A multi day round up of Christmas time
We love it when onboard passenger are loving their trip and share their insights! One was super prolific, so we will pick out the highlights of the first half!
ENJOY!
DAY 1 ARRIVING:
We drove to the airport in Punta Arenas, then boarded our flight — a small jet, 16 rows of 5 — for the flight to King George Island, one of the South Shetland Islands, 60 km off of the Antarctic coast. We eagerly watched for the first iceberg, looking down at the Drake Passage, which was mostly clouded over, but opened up as we approached the island. Presently, we landed on a gravel strip. KGI is a mix of bare rock and ice, with quite a few buildings scattered across the low hills of its bay….
The weather was beautiful; clear and sunny (but still cold—30°, remember). We had safety briefings and other “here’s how things will be going” from Voy, the pilot; then we had a very nice lunch of fried fish (didn’t recognize the Spanish name, but subsequently learned it was hake), salads, and a tart made of layers of thin chocolate cake and caramel. Pretty impressive, considering that the entire galley is the size of a small closet.
DAY 3:
After leaving Yankee Harbor, we headed across the Bransfield Strait overnight. Fortunately, conditions were relatively calm, nothing like the first overnight, and I felt fine and slept well. Marlo had warned us that we might have an early-morning activity, and when I heard the anchor go down at 5:30 am, it sounded like that was indeed a go.
We had stopped at Spert Island, which is a tiny island next to Trinidad Island, both of which are off the coast, but on the southern side (continent-ward) of the Bransfield. Spert Island is a collection of volcanic basalt stacks riddled with vertical fractures, which makes it a miniature archipelago of hundred-foot-tall stacks with narrow channels between them. We piled into the two zodiacs and headed out to explore the channels, as well as a maze of grounded icebergs on the windward side once we’d made our way through the channels. Although yesterday had been gloriously clear skies, today was more typical Antarctic peninsula weather: overcast with a few flakes of snow drifting down. But the rock and ice formations were gorgeous. We motored about for a few hours and saw humpbacks swimming by, lots of assorted sea birds, and then, as we were starting to head back to the boat, two Weddell seals on the shore. We were all bundled up, of course, but sitting mostly still in the zodiacs, it started to get a bit chilly, so we headed back just about the time I started to think “gee, it would be nice to start heading back.”
Day 4:
The overnight in Portal Point was completely calm and flat. There was a light coating of snow on the deck in the morning, but the day dawned with clear blue skies with light clouds here and there. (“Dawning” is a bit metaphorical, because it was of course light all night.) We arose for a 7 am planned landing, with a hike to the top of a snow-covered hill planned before breakfast. Since we would be out for a few hours, we started with a light pre-breakfast breakfast…..
After our plunge and change of clothes, we went out with Lucas to do some “Citizen Science,” taking water samples, measurements, and towing a plankton trap; the samples will be sent to a research project in Argentina and Scripps studying Antarctic ecology. We then stopped at a slope where a couple of ancient whaling boats were half-buried in the snow, went ashore, and hiked up to the top of a hill overlooking the bay where the boat was anchored. After a rapid descent, we then returned to the ship.
For dinner, Leandro, the cook, had outdone himself. Stuffed beef tenderloin, stuffed pork tenderloin, mashed potatoes colored red with beetroot, and sauteed mushrooms; then dessert was a fruit torte prepared by Eva, the first mate and wife of Voy, the captain. A lovely Christmas eve dinner. We (guests and crew) sat around and talked about our various Christmas eve/day traditions and favorite meals to cook and/or eat, and then, about 9:00 pm (still bright outside, of course), retired for the night to see what Santa would drop off at our tiny ship anchored at the bottom of the world.
Day 5:
CHRISTMAS DAY
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. This is a fairly safe dream to have in the Antarctic. The day dawned cold and foggy, with a light snow coming down. No early-morning adventures today; instead, we rose for 7:30 am coffee and tea and an 8:00 am breakfast….
The weather called for continued wind in the de Gerlache strait, so we upped anchor and headed off, planning to travel most of the day. We all settled into our favorite shipboard time-killing routines. Marlo taught Jack some watercolor-painting tips; they both painted panoramas of snowy mountains coming down to the water. Both looked pretty good; we’d had a lot of good reference views these last few days for inspiration. I worked up a new origami design for an Adelie penguin and put the result out on the community table, where it got some approving comments. I’ll probably refine it a bit more during the trip or after, then fold an exhibition model when I get home and have proper black/white duo paper. (And why an Adelie? It has the simplest color pattern. I’ll need to do some more designing to get the extra black stripe of a Chinstrap, or the white earmuffs of a Gentoo.)….
We continued traveling through lunch, and then in the afternoon, dropped anchor in Paradise Harbor, another small bay surrounded by mountains and ice cliffs, with an icefall near the opening that periodically rumbled like thunder during the several hours of the afternoon. Although it was overcast and snowing, we set out in the afternoon, with four people in kayaks and EJ and in in a Zodiac with Lucas piloting, so we both brought our big cameras. Although I have been finding that so much of what I want to photograph are the sweeping vistas, for which my iPhone is the ideal camera; the big camera is more for the wildlife close-ups. As it was, we had plenty of those as we puttered about the bay, pushing through the brash ice; terns and shags nesting on the rocky cliffs, cape petrels perched on icebergs, and at one point, a Weddell seal who gave us the “oh, you again?” look and then went back to napping. The snow was off and on and never got truly heavy, and after a few hours, we all headed back to the ship. Both we and Marlo picked up some blocks of solid water-ice from the bay, so that when we all sat down to happy hour, we had gin-and-tonics over glacier ice. It was, in fact, the first gin-and-tonic I’d ever had in my life; I can’t say that glacier ice made it particularly tasty, but it was a very nice way to top off a busy day. Also during our Happy Hour, I revealed the Adelie penguin that I’d finished, which received a nice set of oohs and ahs. Happy Hour was followed by another glorious dinner by the resourceful Leandro, a fish pie in pastry with marinated red cabbage and carrot, with flan topped by a dollop of dulce de leche for dessert. All in all, a most wonderful Christmas day. NatHab blessed us, every one!
Day 6:
We climbed up the hill, which rose steeply behind the base. The snow had good consistency; easy to kick steps, but not so soft as to be postholing. As we gained the ridge, a rocky arete rose up through the snow and we climbed onto it, following it up to the mini-summit of the ridge, the snow falling away moderately steeply on one side back toward the base, and full-on vertical cliff on the other. Although we’d come up a few hundred feet, our summit was a minor bump on the ridge, and the mountains continued for thousands of feet higher, with icefalls tumbling down the valleys between them to the sea. (I say “tumbling,” but they were static, frozen into position; nevertheless we regularly heard the thunder of collapsing ice from across the bay.)
After immortalizing ourselves with summit pictures, we headed down, boarded the zodiacs, and traveled a bit farther along the coast to another low place with some research buildings near the shore. We came ashore and watched a couple of seals that had hauled out. After waiting for them to photogenically yawn and bat their big, brown eyes at us, we loaded up again to head back to the ship….
After lunch, we headed up on deck to look for orcas, which another ship had spotted in our vicinity a few hours ago. It’s a big ocean, and it was a few hours back that they’d been spotted, but that’s still better than starting the search from scratch. At our meals, we all have our own cloth napkins that we reuse, each with its own napkin ring labeled with a different Antarctic animal. Mine is ORCA, so everyone told me I was responsible for bringing the orcas to us. We’ll see how it goes.
Oh. My. Golly gee whillikers. We went up on deck to look for the orcas as we motored through the de Gerlache Strait, and after a little while, spotted blows in the distance. Pretty soon, we could make out dorsal fins: Yes! There were orcas out there. As we continued along, they got closer and closer, so that we could tell that it was a pod, there were several of different ages. Then suddenly, they all turned and came towards us, and it was the Jaws barrel scene, as these three massive dorsal fins started cutting through the water straight at us. I could hear the strains of John Williams’s score. Voy cut the engines. The first pair swam right up to, then under the boat. The next two swam up to the boat and one turned over as it came right up to the front of the boat. I would swear it was asking for a belly rub. The other turned downward and stuck its flukes up in the air and waved them back and forth; then they all went under the boat and came up on the other side. They then paralleled the boat’s drift for a bit, then started moving off….
. As it was, after they left, we were all wandering about in a bit of a daze, laughing in disbelief that we’d been able to have such an experience. (And I guess I fulfilled my napkin-ring-based assignment.)
Robert L.