17/2/08 7:00
AM
We sat snugly all night. Late evening a crowd of small bits of
Ice came to our bay for a visit but by morning had drifted off. Iceberg Alley around the corner is still
very full. Yesterday everyone spent several hours ashore communing with the
thousands of Gentoo Penguins, the odd seal and a number of Skua birds who can be
quite aggressive towards us but can be chased away by the penguins. The ritual
of waddling several hundred meters,
sometimes from very far up the surrounding hills, in order to find food in the
sea and then repeat the process to
eventually find the right chick is
very interesting to observe. After the shore excursions, Nik, Paolo and I went
for a dinghy stroll down Iceberg Alley, I think Nik wanted to visit each berg
personally.
14:00
We left a little after nine having had
to chop off a great deal of kelp off the anchor chain and the anchor. We picked
our way through lots of ice towards Danco
Island. Our little sketch chart showed an
anchorage which is exposed to the NE and very open to ice, not a good place to
be under the current conditions. We wandered down the West side of the island
and decided it was time to move on to Paradise
Bay. The approach to the LaMaire Straight was
relatively ice free but we encountered quite a bit on the way through the
top. We saw a whale a few hundred
meters in front of us, and several leopard seals chilling on an iceberg or
swimming to the boat to check us out.
Very little wind today and a few snow flurries, still grey but the odd
tiny patch of blue appears from time to time. We are a couple of days ahead of
schedule which is necessary as we have to be back in Ushuaia by the
2nd as Paulo flies on the 3rd, also the way the weather is
shaping up for the end of the month we might have to start back as early as the
23rd.
Who says there are no polar bears in
Antarctica?
