Wednesday January 22. Antarctica
I certainly hope you like photos of ice and mountains and
snow. I’ve included photos of other ships and our bow at times to give you some
idea of perspective and distances. The colours are sometimes hard to adjust –
there is a lot of blue in the photos and it is hard to compensate. The penguin
photos in particular may be grainy. I’m using a long telephoto lens but they
are just too far away!
Day 1 in Antarctica - Monday
We’re visiting various places while we are sailing here.
First thing this morning – about 6:30 am we picked up eight of the Americans
working at the Palmer Ice Station on the Antarctic peninsula. They will do a
presentation on the research done down here at the three American stations.
There are stations from several countries here including Chile, Argentina,
Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. At the same time we picked up an ill
woman from the ketch “Golden Fleece” out of Stanley in the Falklands. We’ll
transport her to a hospital on the mainland.
It’s a lovely sunny day and we’re visiting the Lemaire
Channel (which is blocked with ice so we are not going through). Off to the
left are the 3 crags of Una’s Peaks (we were told a less nice name when we were
here before) named for the last woman many of the men saw when they sailed from
Stanley in the Falklands.
Then off to Paradise Harbour. There’s a massive tabular ice berg here – that’s a flat-topped berg. It is gigantic – higher than our
ship. And remember 80% is under water. There’s a Chilean research station here
– right in the middle of a penguin rookery or colony. The landscapes here are
just awesome in the patchy sunlight. You’ll notice some of the rock is black,
other is brownish. The black is volcanic rock and where it has worn off you see
the underlying brown granite. The tabular iceberg here is just massive. And
we don’t really want to be the next Titanic so we’re well off to the side.
We are back towards the Lemaire Channel because we still
have to drop off the research personnel before the captain sort of steers the
ship in a big circle of calm water overnight.
More sights tomorrow!!
Best
Bob and Elizabeth
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