24/1/08

We had a full days outing yesterday to Volunteer Point and Volunteer Beach about 50 miles as the land rover drives not as the Albatross flies. After an hour and a bit of real road we went off-road for 1¼ hours.  Apparently The Falklands have the highest per capital Landrover ownership in the world being 3.5 Landrovers per family which means something approaching 2000 Landrovers on the islands. This area is part of a huge farm and we have to pay the farmer £15 each for being on his land.  Our driver is of course a local filled with many stories and quite knowledgeable about the wild life.  I had never thought about how many different types of Penguins there are; here we saw a breeding colony of King Penguins estimated at 800 breeding pairs plus chicks.  There are also

Gentoo penguins slightly smaller with white markings on their wings and less orange on their heads, and also the still smaller and black and white Magellanic type.  It is strange to see the birds sheltering in fields and not in snow.  Anything you see in the pictures attached which looks like snow in actually incredibly white and very find sand, which blows on the beach like mist. 

I have just got a new weather forecasst and it looks like we have a window to go to Ushuaia. If we leave tonight we should get to the SE tip of Patagonia before the Westerlies start up again and there is an anchorage where we can wait for ABW (anything but West).

So we’re all running around with final provisioning and I’ve just cleared out, so we should go after dinner. There was quite a good full moon rise last night which should be fantastic tonight.

Pictures:

King Penguins

Magellanic Penguin

Gentoo Penguins

Gabriele and 2 King Penguins-he’s the one in the middle