WINE, DYNAMITE AND PENGUIN TOUR: 21st February 2017 Mainland Antarctica Danco Island and Fournier Bay

21st February 2017 Mainland Antarctica Neko Harbour and Fournier Bay

STOP PRESS

Steve and Janette and other passengers celebrate having done all 7 continents !!

Today, was an earlier start than normal as we had to travel further north during the afternoon. Many of us were still feeling a bit smug after the whale experience of yesterday, there seemed a distinct lack of traction, however, as you might expect on this continent of change and challenge, this was also going to be a good day.

They smell bad but they are hard not to love !

Kitting up with our customary 5 layers, re- sterilising and boarding the Zodiac boats, our first expedition today was to Neko Harbour to land on the Antarctic Mainland for the first time.

Neko is home to a huge Gentoo penguin colony and pretty spectacular this was. As it was further north, some of the chicks were younger and they are so funny to watch. The chicks especially curious, walk very close and in Steve’s case, almost over his boot.
There are of course rules when here such as don’t go more than 5m close to a bird unless they choose to investigate you, but nobody had told the penguins these rules ! Within minutes they were all heading towards us like hundreds of little charlie chaplins heading down over the ice to check out the newcomers.

The smell was epic .........People had made reference to the smell and in the end, we just called this fresh air.

Away from the danger area - ice chunks weighing

many thousands of tons regularly falls off creating

waves on the beech aras

We are not allowed to stay on the beach after landing as the Glaciers are very mobile and huge 1000+ ton chunks of ice regularly (hourly) fall off and create small tsunamis on an almost daily basis.

Stunning as the area is, we were always made aware of the danger and after a walk around, went on a zodiac tour of the coast with a small group but didn’t manage to get far due to sheer amount of glacier ice (brash ice) hitting the boat or clogging up the outboard prop of the boat.

We found a happy family of crab eater seals who played with us for a while and saw some spectacular icebergs.
The scenery was about as forbidding as it could possibly be here and we could not help feeling that we were grateful that the crew checked us off the boat and checked us back in again...its hard to imagine you could survive here even in these suits for more that a day and nobody would here you. We were exploring a 500 mile stretch of the South Shetland Islands but Antarctica is as big as Europe and Australia combined so the feeling on insignificance is always with us.

Eventually, after many fantastic pictures and mild frostbite, we went back to the boat to de-kit, de-ice and feed.

On the way back to the ship, we took the Zodiac to explore the local glaciers and to try and get close to the mouth of one - which was forming new icebergs. This get progressively harder as you get to the glazier mouth as the ice gets more and more and wants to try and clog the propeller of the engine up so sometimes we have to reverse to free the prob. All of our crews have radios to each other and the ship but at no time did we have any issues that required additional help - thankfully, these Canadian crew members are extremely experienced.

No Two whale tales are alike and all
pictures of them have to be submitted for ID

There was no need for the Zodiacs in the afternoon as we ventured down the Fournier Bay. The sister ship has emailed to say that there was a collection of whales feeding here but that was over 10 days ago.

On deck, with our binoculars, cameras and everybody trying to wear as many hats and gloves as they could, we sat and waited as we drifted into the bay looking at the whales “bubble feeding”.

A Group of Whales "Bubble Feeding"

Ari the whale expert confirmed this is a new behaviour in the Antarctic where the whales circle in a group and blow air bubbles to ambush the fish, then in one giant mouth full, they are consumed and although he had seen it in the Arctic, he had never seen it in the Antarctic until now

Our first group brought masses of excitement and another terabyte of photography but eventually we realised that there were so many of them, we just needed to witness this rare sight of 50-80 whales feeding and whilst we all nearly froze to death, nobody was going off deck.

Totally satisfied that we could say that we had seen a rare and new for Antarctica feeding method, a rare event for the non specialist general public to see, we needed food, alcohol and sleep…tomorrow is our last expedition day and whilst many are on the last legs of energy, nobody is going to miss anything on this continent of awe inspiring scenery and constant surprises.