Minke whales near Peterman Island

February 2, 1994

4:30pm

When we left Hovgaard Island, we started back up the Lemaire Channel. Partway up it, however, we found that it had iced over since we came through, so we weren't able to pass that way again. We turned around right in the middle of the Channel, which seemed a tricky feat, and went back down the Channel once more and then around Hovgaard Island into the French Straits.

Turning around inside the Lemaire Channel

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.

Side 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.

Minke whales off Peterman Island

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...

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