January 28, 2023
Today’s itinerary called for us to visit Half Moon Bay. Unfortunately, the ice had other ideas. For this portion of the cruise the Marina’s Captain is joined by an Ice Captain, a captain who has specific expertise navigating the waters of Antarctica and understands how deceptively dangerous its ice floes and icebergs (only 10% of which appear above water and that have a reputation for rolling over without any advance warning – something we did not witness) can be. On the advice of the Ice Captain we were rerouted to Deception Island. Working together, the Captain, Ice Captain and Expedition Team mapped out an alternate route that continued to impress!
At each turn the continent and ice grew larger and larger. Some of the icebergs were as big as our ship and some were bigger than a city block.
Water in this area is 110 feet deep – and yet this iceberg is GROUNDED! It would have floated into this area from a deeper area, where it ran aground and stayed put.
The one above was larger than our ship and the one below was 1/4 mile across and nearly 150 feet tall!
Some icebergs were a harboring penguins, especially if there were Orcas in the water. Notice all the black dots on the iceberg below.
We traveled by several penguin colonies. The pink “stains” on the snow is penguin guaba (poop). Hope that wasn’t TMI? There are roughly 140,000 pairs of nesting penguins in this area. The species in the photos below are Adelei (pronounced a daily).
We saw many glaciers.
This part of Antarctica is an active volcano that last erupted in August 1970
We also saw some Antarctic research stations. Can you imagine living here for a year and marching through this landscape. Gave us even greater admiration for the bravery (craziness?) of the first explorers and for those who ventured to the South Pole.
This small red dot in the picture to the right is an emergency shelter in case you get stuck out there during a storm. Ken’s thinking “Good luck finding this!”
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