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 2^nd as Paulo flies on the 3^rd, also the way the weather is shaping up for the end of the month we might have to start back as early as the 23^rd.

Who says there are no polar bears in Antarctica?