This morning we woke up early again, around 6am, to get ready for our landing at Port Lockroy. I got looked out the window at about 6:10, and saw a magnificent vista of glacial snow and ice and immense, imposing, impressive mountainsides. This is the wall of the Neumeyer Channel. I got outside around 6:45, and watched as we entered the harbor that makes Port Lockroy, where the British set up a fort during World War II to watch the Japanese and Germans when it was feared that they were building bases in the Antarctic peninsula and the South Georgia Islands.
There are some very impressive mountains here, and Port Lockroy is just a series of small rock islands in the middle of a harbor surrounded by mountains and icebergs, and a glacier between two mountains on one side. There is a Chilean Station here on a separate island right next to the one that we are landing on, which contains a huge Gentoo Penguin rookery.
At breakfast, we watched Gentoo Penguins swimming outside the ship, and admired the mountains with a British couple. Yesterday we had dinner with a couple from Lancashire.
There is much more snow now on the mountains, and on the rocks along the shore. Even in the penguin rookery we found snow banks, though most of it was rocks.
When we got to the landing site, we stepped out onto rocks and water. Large rocks, ranging from several feet to about half a foot in diameter. They were dark gray with lighter streaks and speckles, and were mostly wet and slippery. I was extremely glad that I brought the boots that I did (heavy and with plenty of tread on the bottom, not the light rubber boots that most people had) during this entire landing.
The landing area was very low, and there was water on all sides with just a narrow path of rocks up to higher ground. The water on the far side of the landing area was enclosed from the surrounding way somewhat, and was filled with ice floating on the surface in large chunks. There were penguins swimming in the water and hopping in at one end and jumping onto the rocks at the other. They would line up at one end and then either jump in or turn around and go back onto the higher rocks.
As I walked farther inot the island, I noted more and more guano muck. People were instructed to walk in the muck instead of taking risks on the round rocks or disturbing the penguins that were nesting on the these rocks higher up. The Gentoo were raising their new young when we arrived. They had already established fairly large (1.5 to 2 foot diameter) nests made of small stones (1 to 2 inch diameter). There were typically two parents (I couldn't distinguish their genders) with one or two (mostly two) half-sized chicks. The chicks were still fuzzy, but mostly dark gray and white now. Only a few were still slightly brownish. A few of the chicks had their heads stuck under a parent's body, laying on their stomachs, but most of them were standing near to the parents and close to each other, generally standing with their heads raised up toward a parent's beak, poking and searching for a bit of food. When a chick became apparently very hungry, it would start waving it's arms around and squawk in a higher pitch than the parents, and sometimes it would look around almost as if it were ready to leave the nest and go off on its own in search of food.
Occassionally, a parent would move toward another nest, and the encroached parents would stick out their heads and beaks at it and squawk, warning it off. Sometimes, a parent would leave the nest and go in search of food (in the water) or rocks (nestled between larger rocks in the open areas of the island).
In the back of the island, there was a skeletal wooden shack near the shore, and the huge bones of at least one whale. It was probably a Minke, since several were spotted (alive) when we arrived in the harbor. The bones were all jumbled, with huge curved ribs mixed with a long flat spine (I think). There were huge (foot and a half at least, a foot for the round part) vertebrae thrown around, now white and either rotting or just gnawed at by erosion.
In the water off the island about 20 yards on this side, there were a few rocks standing in the water, with a leopard seal on the far side, waiting for unwary penguins to come too close. It looked just like a rock itself when it wasn't moving, round and shiny and colored just like the rocks.
While I was by the bones, I watched as a penguin from higher up waddled down to a place between two standing bones or rocks, where a small pile of leftover small rocks were. It tried picking up a couple in its beak, but they were probably too big. Then, another penguin came from the other direction, and they met right in the middle of this narrow passage between the standing objects. They looked at each other, then began a strange parody of Japanese gentlemen, bowing to each other cautiously and repeatedly, over and over. I'm not sure if they were trying to vie for rocks in the cluster, or trying to determine precedence somehow, or trying to decide who should get out of the way. They just stood their bowing to each other. Eventually, one of them (the newcomer, I think) gave up and turned around and left. The remaining one laid down on its stomach on the rocks and stayed there for a while.
There were a small number of large, dark brown birds with white spackles on their wings flying over the rookery. When they got too low over a group of Gentoo with chicks, all of the parents angled their heads up and squawked violently at the bird to frighten it off. I later saw these birds flying low around the water behind the ship, landing on the water briefly and searching for fish.
On the way back to the zodiacs, I cleaned my boots of all the muck by standing off shore on the submerged rocks and shaking my feet and straping the boots against the rocks. It worked very well, especially as the waves washed in and out of the narrow spaces between the rocks. At the embarkation area, the crew members had brushes (toilet bowl cleaners, really) to clean our boots and rain pants with.
When we returned to the ship, they had hot red wine and hot tea waiting for us in the transport area while they cleaned the boots and rain pants of anyone who hadn't done it on shore.
Much of this ice is blue now, formed by the pressure under the glaciers. The ice recrystalizes, forming a harder ice that refracts the light differently, making it blue.
The water is a dark powdery cornflower blue with navy waves and some whitecaps. The mountains are white and light gray (snow) and navy blue (rock). The clouds are pigeon gray above that. It's almost eerie the way the mountains are brighter than the sky. They seem to be glowing.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of haze and cloud cover, so we can't see the tops of most of these mountains. I certainly hope that things are better when we get to Paradise Bay, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the Antarctic.
We arrived at Paradise Bay around 3:00pm. Just before arriving here, we saw a very large number of seals on icebergs. There were probably dozens of icebergs in the vicinity with one to three seals on them. There were many dozens of icebergs in the area, some of which were brilliant blues, obviously from the bottoms of glaciers where the pressure is high and recrystalization occurs.
We also saw a large number of whales, including Killer, Minke, and Humpback whales. In some places, we saw several groups of whales at the same time, one with four or five, others with two or three.
When we entered Paradise Bay, I was filled with a very deep feeling that was almost fear, but definitely contained a degree of awe and wonder. We were literally surrounded by a ring of immense mountains, not actually near us, but close enough to be seen through the haze. These mountains were all around us, and it felt to me as though we were in a ring surrounded by godlike judges, or gods. I was reminded of movie scenes like the sentencing of the Phantom Zone villians in Superman II, or the images I pictured in my mind of the Norse Gods at Valhalla or the Greek Gods on Mt. Olympus. All around us were immense, towering, snow-covered rocky mountains, thousands of feet high, with glaciers coming down to the bay and a ring of ice bordering on the water, dozens of feet high at least, maybe a hundred or more. There were icebergs everywhere in the water it seemed, and the ship was gliding slowly through them. The mountains were visible but slightly obscured by the mist, and there was a feeling of veiled power in the settling. Everything was silent except for the ship and the water, which was now suddenly very calm, with no wind.
While we made our way into the bay, we heard a huge booming sound, like a gunshot from a distance. It was an iceberg calving off of a glacier somewhere in the bay. The echos made it impossible to judge where the calving had occured, and there was no sign to tell us which iceberg it was that had just been formed.
We passed by a ruined Argentinian base, which Lars-Eric told us had been burned in the 60s by a doctor who'd been assigned to the station and didn't want to stay there. He apparently went mad and torched the place. Of course, he was able to leave the station then, but he went straight to prison.
Our landing site was the new Chilean base, farther into the bay, with a huge Gentoo Penguin rookery all around it.
We were in the first landing group, but I got to the Polo Lounge late, so I had to wait for one of the later zodiacs in our group. There were more Gentoos swimming in the bay on our way in, and lots of ice. I noted as we traveled over the bay that the mountain behind the ship remained roughly the same apparent size, while the ship shrunk quickly. It gave a real idea of the immensity of scale in the bay.
The base was empty: apparently the Chileans were all gone for a while. There were thousands of penguins, however, all making noise just like their cousins at Port Lockroy. It was much drier here, however. The ground was stone mixed with a soft, spongy dry material that I assume must be dried mixture of mud and guano.
There were also cormerants and a very fat white bird variety, scavenging among the rookery residents. Offshore I spotted two large predator birds, mostly white with black patches on their sides, long legs, and hooked beaks, standing on rocks. They looked like seagulls to me.
Nearer to the mountain's walls now, I saw how the snow formed huge banks protruding far out from the mountains' actual sides. These often formed vertical cliffs thousands of feet high, with ridges and lips at the top that hung out in space and radiated with a cold blue light.
This was finally Antarctica! We had at last landed on a portion of the Antarctic continent, and set foot on true Antarctic ground for the first time, joining the other brave and curious human beings who had traveled this far to walk on a new continent.