Part 1
Ahh, finally. A chance to sleep in. Except I didn’t at all, and woke up at 6:00 AM even though breakfast wasn’t ready until 8:00 AM. Gah.
While being terribly excited to experience everything we can, I also blame these early mornings partially on all of the programming available to us. With all of the presentations and lectures and landings and more, our days have been jam packed. I brought my runners and there’s a gym, but I haven’t spent any time in there at all because, well, there is no time! In some ways, I kind of wish “down time” would be built in - even a half hour or 60 minutes here and there would do - just so we have the opportunity to decompress and get ready for the next inevitable exciting and/or interesting and/or educational thing (I’m really not complaining; just a little tired).
And from this point on, I stopped writing on the ship (written on February 17)
I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I was feeling overwhelmed by all that we were doing every single day; I even skipped a presentation on “Why Antarctica Matters” on this day while the ship was navigating to our next destination. Shocking! (Thank goodness hubs went and was able to fill me in afterwards, ha.)
I had been attempting to do my write-ups in the mornings while the experiences from the previous day were still fresh in my mind, but by this point - as somewhat evidenced by what I wrote on February 2 - trying to document it all as it was happening almost started to feel like a chore. Of course in hindsight, I wish I’d forced myself to do it because now I’m left trying to piece it all together from our Daily Programs and the pictures I’d captured that day. Oh well.
Okay, so here we go: me trying to remember what happened!
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| What a palaver! |
Our first excursion for this day took place in the early afternoon at Palaver Point, west of Two Hummock Island of the Palmer Archipelago. About the site, from our Daily Program: “Home to a small Chinstrap penguin population, its name describes the kerfuffle and commotion of the colony.” And the name did not disappoint! There was a lot of squawking and blaring going on. Even though we’d already seen Chinstraps on our voyage, this was the first time seeing an actual Chinstrap colony. It was also the first time on the trip that we stepped foot on snow - which was surprising for many guests on the boat, who were expecting a lot more of the white stuff, being Antarctica, and all (but it’s summer!).
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| Decent view from the point |
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| Looks like this Antarctic fur seal was making a palaver, too |
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| Penguin tracks in the snow |
It was from the zodiacs at Palaver Point where we also saw our first Minke whale! As part of the excursion, those who are seeking certain “adventure options” can pay extra and do such activities as kayaking, paddling, or stand-up paddle boarding. As we were getting into the zodiacs from the ship, there was a Minke whale playing with the stand-up paddle boarders who were getting set for their paddle around the point. He seemed like a friendly and curious little whale, hanging around to see what was going on and engaging with the paddlers.
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| First Minke sighting |
Italian Market Dinner and a Note About the Dining Room
We enjoyed an early dinner, which was Italian-themed. The food and beverage, and kitchen and serving staff, were all incredible on our journey. Friendly and accommodating, after the very first day when hubs and I talked to Keith the Maître d' and Marlon his second-in-command about our dietary restrictions, we were greeted as “Ma’am Angie” and “Sir Matthew” (nicknames, I should say, we’ve missed hearing every day since we left the ship). The head chef is also a wizard with watermelon carvings and had intricately carved fruit waiting for all the guests as we walked into the dining room that evening.
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| Watermelon flowers |
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| What's "hoot hoot" in Italian, I wonder...? |
Evening Excursion: Graham Passage
The original plan for this evening was to be in Cierva Cove. I cannot remember why, but that plan had to change. And so, that evening after dinner, we loaded up the zodiacs again to cruise instead around Graham Passage which “lies north of Charlotte Bay between the Antarctic Continent and Bluff Island. Stunning, narrow and glaciated, this passage also provides great potential for sighting marine mammals.”
And how! It was here that I first felt like we were on an entirely different planet. The evening was a little gloomy. It had been misty and then started to rain, which turned into snow. At one point during the zodiac cruise, we were surrounded by huge, towering walls of ice. We watched seals and birds resting on icebergs. It was so quiet.
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| So many terms to describe the different kinds of ice... think this is an ice wall |
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| Antarctic cormorant a.k.a. shag |
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| Giant ice! Ship in the distance for scale |
And then, as if by magic, the snow stopped and a Minke whale appeared - and it wasn’t just any sighting. This guy was another curious whale, swimming in between and next to the zodiacs, and then underneath us! He even followed us back to the ship when it was time for us to go in for the night. It was an incredible encounter that left us wanting more. I’m not sure what we missed at Cierva Cove, but Graham Passage was an amazing alternative and a definite highlight for me.
Note: the next morning talking to Jimmy the whale guy, I asked him if there was any risk to the whales being so close to the propellers on the zodiacs. He had absolute confidence that the whales know what they are doing, and as long as we are being predictable i.e. driving straight and not making sudden movements, there is zero chance of them being hurt. In his words, “They are Olympians.”
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| It's a Minke over there! |
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| Having fun with the humans |
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| Swimming under our zodiac |
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| Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Minke! |
The Superbowl
Amazingly, the excitement for the day wasn’t over yet! The crew made last-minute, surprise arrangements to try and live stream the Superbowl game for the guests. Watching the Superbowl from a ship in Antarctica... so weird! But, pretty cool. It worked out well, although they had to use almost every bit of bandwidth available on the ship for the game. (Hubs and I only made it to halftime and then went to bed.)
Speaking of internet, we could have paid a (not inexpensive) fee to access WiFi for the time we were on the ship, but we opted not to. There were many reasons for this: as mentioned, it was costly. But the internet was also dependent on satellites and could therefore be either intermittent or non-existent. And how many times in our over-connected lives would we have a real chance to just disconnect from it all? We reasoned that, if there was an emergency, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway. So we took the opportunity and decided to truly be offline.
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