Friday 4th March; 5th day at sea

I woke up at 5:45 a.m. and peered around the blind to see where we were. We’d anchored at a place called Brown Bluff (so called because there was the obvious landmark was a brown bluff) and decided there was a possibility of some photographs. A few other people were up as well as a single Sheathbill. I took a few photos of the early morning light which seem to have come out quite well and then heard a distant crashing noise – not thunder but a large block of ice falling into the sea. We’d arrived during the night and anchored in a small bay with lots of icebergs, which dampened the sea so much that it hardly moved. With the almost total silence, the smallish icebergs and the early morning light it was a really beautiful place. We landed here for a while, the only time we stepped onto the mainland of Antarctica itself, and saw Gentoo and Adélie penguins, plus the usual fur seals, a Weddell Seal that more or less completely ignored us, and a Leopard Seal splashing just offshore.

Adélie penguins

Gentoo penguins

Weddell seal

This is apparently the only serious predator the penguins have and they weren’t keen to be in the water when it was around. It was here that we had the first casualty; one of the people in the same group as us had gone on a walk on a glacier, fallen, and broken her wrist. Fortunately there was a doctor on the ship (well, several if you counted the passengers) who strapped it up; there was no possibility of an x-ray until we got to South Georgia however.

After the landing there was time for a quick drink and then it was back into the zodiacs, eight of them this time, rather than the usual three, for a cruise down the Fridtjof Sound, which connects the Antarctic Straight at the top of the Peninsula with the Erebus and Terror Gulf (named after the Royal Navy’s two ice ships which James Ross took into the Ross Sea in 1841, and which were lost with Franklin’s expedition to find the North-West Passage in 1845). It seems being able to do this was quite rare but the wind speed was quite low and whilst there was a lot of ice around, it wouldn’t cause us any problems. The trip was a mix of drifting about and edging closer to any interesting wildlife, mostly seals or penguins, though some people saw a Minke Whale, or icebergs we could find, coupled with exhilarating bursts of 20 knots moving around the Sound. While we were out in the boats, the ship had moved off down the sound and anchored at the end of it. We got back on, and had lunch, whilst the ship headed off towards Devil Island.

This was to be our second landing of the day, on a small island a few hundred yards north of a larger one called Vega Island (named by a Swedish explorer Nils Otto Gustav Nordenskjöld – more about him later). Devil Island was quite small, and consisted of two hills, separated by a small neck of land. One party went up the larger of the two hills, but they were slightly outdone by the Captain who obviously fancied a trip ashore. He strode up the smaller of the two hills, and then went up the larger one as well. I don’t know what the view from the top was, but we went part of the way up the smaller hill and got a wonderful view over the iceberg dotted sea from there, looking over to the Prince Gustav Channel and the Trinity Peninsula on the mainland. On the way back to the ship, Hannah who was driving our zodiac, took us off on a “jolly”, as Malcolm, one of the passengers on the zodiac put it, to look at an iceberg, which due to age was heavily crevassed and was turning a nice shade of blue in places.

Old ice

The late afternoon and evening was very pleasant with a beautiful sunset behind Vega Island, and our first proper whale chase. Someone spotted a pod of Orcas (Killer Whales) off to starboard, and amidst the pandemonium on the bridge the officer on watch changed course and reduced the speed a little so we could get nearer to them. Eventually most of the passengers and also some of the hotel staff on the ship were on deck somewhere, either the outside observation level below the bridge, or the bridge wings, or the foredeck.

Sunset in the Erebus & Terror Gulf

Late that night we anchored off Snow Hill Island. About 11 p.m. I heard what sounded like the ship running over some wreckage, so I went up to the bridge to see what was happening. We’d been running over small lumps of ice throughout the evening and clearly we’d just crunched over more or large lumps. Everything seemed to be OK, and the captain was using the bridge searchlights to pick out where we were; all I could see was a brown wall, but I wasn’t sure whether it was rock or a large iceberg that whose colour was being distorted by something. According to the GPS/bridge computer we’d arrived so I went to bed.