Lesley and Stuart's Travels: Saturday 6 February

Antarctica Day 1

WOW! FANTASTIC! AMAZING!

This landscape is mind-blowing! So vast ….... seemingly empty ……. seemingly endless. So many hues of grey, black, brown, white, blue, with a teeny, tiny hint of green (lichen).

This morning we cruised down Neumayer Channel to anchor off Port Lockroy, a British post now used largely for tourism and historical research. The station is on a tiny island, the buildings renovated but exactly as they had been when first built.

There is a shop and post office there now, and tourists call in to post their cards. Ours will be collected in two day’s time, go to Falkland Islands, then on to London to be distributed to the addresses on them round the world. They’ll arrive at least 2 months after we get home, but they’ll have that unique postmark! The station is manned by four young people who are there for four months. They came aboard our ship to have showers – been eleven days since their last one! The temperature was 0°.

Only a small number of visitors can land at any one time, so we staggered the groups over a three-hour period. The island is home to rookeries of Gentoo penguins, and of course the associated smell is something to behold! We weren’t allowed within 5m of them, and if they came to us we had to stand still and wait for them to pass. They build their nests with little rocks, and even pinch them from each other. Most have two chicks, some pairs younger than other ones.

gentoo penguins moult - this one is feeling miserable during this process.

We then moved on to LeMaire Channel and Port Charcot, an early French outpost, abandoned many years ago, but as there was nowhere to land we moved further south and anchored off a bay where icebergs get caught (iceberg graveyard). The temperature eventually crept up to 4°. The water was like glass – no breeze and no movement save for the occasional penguins and seals swimming about. Cruising down LeMaire Channel was very slow as the ship had to manoeuvre between small icebergs whilst staying in the deep (200-400m) channel. Some of the mountains adjacent to the channel were over 2000m high. As this channel is narrow and full of ice, ships are unsure if they can navigate through it. This was the first time our ship had been into this channel this year.

we passed a sailing ship!

seals resting

We visited an island – half of us on the island walking up to the summit around penguins, the other half cruising in the zodiacs around the icebergs, through thin sheet ice and small chunks of ice and gate-crashing crabeating seal slumber parties on their own little private icebergs. [Crabeating seals don’t actually eat crabs – they are krill eaters.] Then the two groups swapped. We felt very insignificant in this vast landscape. The view from the top was for miles around – magic. The snow was soft and many of us sank in it. Some had trouble walking in it.