Location: Brown Bluff
Mission accomplished. I’ve walked on all seven continents. Can I get warm now?
As I (poorly) explained yesterday, our visit to Point Wild was unplanned, a bonus for the quick transit across the Drake Passage. Today is our first scheduled tour. Each day is broken into morning and afternoon sessions – one of which will be a zodiac ride to the coast and an hour+ walk in nature, the other is a zodiac-only tour (no walking) of the area. I don’t know if I will be able to post twice a day, but i will try.
Antarctic tour rules only allow 100 visitors at a time, so the 224 guests on the Silver Wind are broken into six zodiac groups. You are called down one group at a time, you put on your waterproof boots in the “mud room”, and then ten at a time board a zodiac and get bussed to your adventure.
On the Silver Wind the zodiac piers extend from the side of the ship. This is different than the Silver Origin in the Galapagos where the pier was on the rear of the ship. However, the getting on and off the zodiacs is essentially the same. The big exception is the amount of clothing you are wearing here.
The boots did their job, as we exited the zodiac in the surf and walked a meter to the drop-your-life-vest spot. A two-minute “welcome to Antarctica, please follow the rules” speech and we were off. This spot had a rookery of Gentoo penguins.
In general, the pictures are of a better quality today because the weather is better. Yesterday the 40+ knots wind constantly blew rain on my lens. Today there is barely any wind at all. It’s still freezing cold (0° C, 32° F), but very clear and calm. Which not was only appreciated by me, but also by another penguin visitor – a Fur Seal.
The penguins are in the middle of their annual moult. As the Antarctic summer ends they need a new set of feathers to protect them from the coming winter and allow for waterproof swimming. Here two Gentoo waddled to the beach for a quick dip, one of whom was in serious moult.
Dodging around the penguins were several Snowy Sheathbills. They happily clean up around the penguin families, and are not above grabbing an unguarded egg.
Here’s a landscape picture for you, to help set the stage. Seems this was once a volcano that blasted thru the ice and snow. The brown really stands out from the surrounding tundra. Our landing spot was very near the white/brown divide.
To close things out, here’s the view out of my cabin veranda. I half expected a secret agent to drive out of the cave-looking part in the middle. Yeah, it was worth coming down here.
Thanks to our massively improved internet, I can upload much larger images than with previous cruises. Last year, as the Silver Moon passed thru the Straight of Magellan, I could barely keep a 10 kbps connection. Today, much farther south, I have yet to get below 8 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up.
However, even with Starlink, I down-size the images to a max of 3000 pixels and 2 megabytes in size. I don’t want to strain those poor satellites.