We are now going to be leaving Port Lockroy and sailing through the Lemaire Channel, then we'll make a brief landing on Hovgaard Island to see a colony of Elephant Seals.
It's 38 degrees F outside and sunny.
Yesterday, we spent a great deal of time at the landing at Paradise Bay. Because of this, we were put off schedule, so now we need to move a little more quickly through our schedule today. That's fine with me, because I'm looking forward to what's coming up with a great deal of anticipation. Now that we've seen some of the more beautiful locations on the Antarctic Peninsula, I'm excited about seeing more of the continent, including the Ross Sea most especially.
For me, the landing at Paradise Bay was not really as interesting as I'd expected it to be. My understanding of it before I came here was that the beauty was in the ice. I was expecting very colorful ice formations, etc. As it turned out, the true beauty (in my mind) was the sheer immensity of the mountains and the way they completely surrounded us, and the number of icebergs. I enjoyed the location and the scenery a great deal, but the landing was not very exciting.
Immediately after Eunice's Tits, again on the continent side, there is a very tall, narrow, singular peak. When taking it's picture, I noticed that the camera just doesn't seem able to capture the magnitude of the peak. No matter what I do, the camera seems to shrink the peak into a reasonable size, while in reality, the peak is most unreasonably high, towering over us so that one has to crane one's neck upward to view the peak, and making it difficult to focus on the whole thing all at once. Of course, part of this is simply caused by the fact that we're so close, because of the narrowness of the channel, but it still appears immense.
Also on the left, there is a mountain with unusually twisted lines on it. They start out horizontally on the right side, then curve upwards toward the middle and end up going almost vertically up the mountain. On the right of the channel, there is a large mountain that is mostly dark rock, almost black, with had portions of dark red and lighter brown mixed in. With the white snow and the brilliant sunlight, it makes a spectacular sight.
On the whole, the Lemaire Channel is interesting because it seems so narrow at the far end when you're passing through it. It is really quite long, but the flatness of the sea and the straightness of the channel give a distorted sense of perspective, so that it widens as you pass through it. Since there are large icebergs in it, I have to have faith that the captain knows what he's doing and isn't actually heading us into a dead-end.
Lars-Eric just informed us that when we exit the channel, we will have to decide whether or not we can make a landing at Hovgaard Island, based on the ice conditions we find. We would need to drift to allow enough time for the brief landings.
Looking back on the Lemaire Channel, it seems almost impossible that we got the ship through there. Our captain is certainly to be congratulated on his skill in avoiding all of the large icebergs that were collecting toward the southern end of the channel.
Hovgaard Island seems quite low, at least near the landing area. There are very large rocks there, and Lars-Eric has told us that the landing side isn't rocky, but made of rock (e.g., the rocks are very big and smooth). We should be able to see a group of Elephant Seals here, which we won't be likely to see much of elsewhere on this trip.
The water and winds are very calm right now, which is fortunate because it means we can stay here long enough to land. Also fortunately, the ice, which we encountered a great deal of at the northern end of the channel, is almost entirely absent here.
We visited Hovgaard Island early this afternoon. It was a perfectly clear day: the best weather that had been available all season long according to Lindblad. On our way out to the island on the zodiac, our driver, Stina Carlson, stopped so that we could take pictures. (She also took some.) I grabbed a shot of the Marco Polo with the mountains just outside the Lemaire Channel as a backdrop. Truly spectacular...
On the island, which was, as expected, composed of large rocks, we saw lots of Gentoo Penguins. More importantly, however, we saw Elephant Seals on the edges of the island. The Elephant Seals were all young males, it seems. I watched three of them as they lay side by side on the stone at the edge of the island. They had their flippers around each others' backs, and they were for the most part pretty still. I believe that they were very aware of what was going on around them, and maybe a little frightened by all of the people. There was one seal in the water nearby, and he may have been thinking about coming out and joining the others, but he didn't as long as we were there.
Every so often, one of the seals would stretch and flail it's flippers, or look up, craning it's neck. They also flatulated a lot, expanding their bodies like balloons and then expelling the gas with a huge noise. Once, a penguin came to close to the group and one of the seals let out a bellow at it to get it to move off. The penguin wasn't phased much, and just kept on going by.
The Marco Polo's helicopter had launched while we were embarking on our zodiac, and now it flew by in the distance every so often. It was taking film footage for the New Zealand documentary film crew that's recording a feature on Antarctic Tourism. Whenever the helecopter flew by, one of the seals would raise its head up and watch.
There was another, larger, seal on the other side of some rocks. It was by itself, and it looked up now and then at the people staring at it. Right when I came by with my camera, it yawned, so I caught that.
When the helicopter passed by on the far side of the channel between Hovgaard Island and the island that created the Lemaire Channel (Booth Island), it was clear how immense the mountains really were. Since it was such a fantastically clear day and since the mountains were so large and the sea so flat, it wasn't easy to get an idea of the perspective of the mountains. However, when the helicopter flew by on the far side, nearer to the cliffs, it was so small compared to the mountains... I had to get a picture of that also.
On the way back on the zodiac, I shot a few of the amazing icebergs that were gathering nearby. The icebergs were very blue, and were in unusual shapes, probably due to a lot of breaking up and turning over. One, in particular, was partially transparent, so the blue color was exaggerated.
While cruising northward toward Palmer Station, we passed Peterman Island, and saw an Argentine station with two crosses nearby. One of the crosses was for a group of British Survey members who had been stranded due to calving icebergs while they were skiing out on their expedition. They were unable to make it back to the base, and were lost in crevasses, most likely. The other cross was for a man who died of a heart attack on the Lindblad Explorer in 1987. He died in the Ross Sea, and the Explorer was trying to bring him back to Ushuaia but they realized that they couldn't do it by the time they got here. (They were trying to keep him in a box normally used for fishing equipment, and I suppose it wasn't preserving him very well.) So, they buried him here in a ceremony attended by everyone on the ship, and brought a cross back on the next trip.
[ Note: Later on at dinner, Dana told me that Lindblad had told her about another mishap with this man's funeral. When they had everyone on the ship's deck, they slid him off into the channel as a burial at sea (not actualy burying him on the island). But they never heard a splash. They looked over the edge, and saw him floating away on an iceberg, so they had to send a party out on a small boat to take him off and dump him into the water. I don't know how true this is, but it certainly is a cute story... ]
We also saw a group of two or three Minke whales very close to the ship, and I tried to photograph them, but I probably didn't catch them above water. Whale pictures are extremely hard to get, since they sound so quickly.
The weather is really amazing today. It's like a clear winter day in the dead of winter back in Michigan, or maybe a spring day. The sky is clear, the air is clear, and the sun is shing brightly on everything. As we pass through icebergs and water, everything stands out brightly, in perfect contrast. Definitely a day for the Ektar 25 film...
He related how one of his lead dogs on one of his surveying expeditions (he was the leader of the British Antarctic Survey at Stonington in the 50s) once refused to accept a command to turn left while pulling his sledge. He insisted, and the dog went a few feet then stopped dead at the place where the land stopped and led to a gap filled with water. The dog looked back at him as if to say, "I told you so." He then commanded the dog to go to the right and cross a hill, and, without being told, the dog then did that and turned back around to the left afterwards to continue where the correct path had been. Fuchs had never been to this particular place before, but the dog had. This was an example that he used to demonstrate the intelligence of these dogs, and the value that they gave to the expeditions in this area. Especially in the days when airplanes were scarce.
Fuchs also mentioned how well the men got to know the dogs during these expeditions. They could distinguish the dogs' individual voices and behaviors to the point that they could tell when a row started outside their tents exactly which dog had started it and which others were involved.