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Waiting on steps
Albatross Hotel
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At 3.30 we made our way to the Albatross Hotel and gathered with others from the cruise to await our collection for a very short bus ride to the ship (the quayside being considered too dangerous to allow the public to walk through).
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Before boarding we had to pass through the same baggage x-rays that they have at airports and then we queued up at the gangway to hand over our local fuel surcharge payments together with our passports.
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Boarding Explorer
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Cabin
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We were then shown down to our cabin for the voyage. At about 2m50 by 2m50 containing two single beds, a wardrobe, set of drawers and small table it was actually quite spacious. In addition was a small en-suite.
Un-packed and settled ourselves in as the ship made its departure. Before travelling too far we were gathered for a talk on safety followed by instructions on life-jackets and a lifeboat drill, just in case.
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Mountains
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As we made our way down the Beagle Channel the sun shone and we had further introductions to the principle staff and an outline of our programme and soon it was 19.30 and time for a four course dinner. As the evening drew on we dropped off the pilot and headed into the South Atlantic; the waves increased in height and the ship started to pitch and rolled, but we mainly slept through it.
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Beagle Channel
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On deck
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Lifeboat drill
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Bow
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The sun rose about 5.15, I went up on deck to take a look, nothing very spectacular, but we were being followed by petrels, an occasional albatross and prions flitting above the waves.
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With the state of the sea only a small number attended breakfast or attended the first lecture of the day entitled 'Sea Birds of the Southern Ocean' with Callan Duck, our bird specialist, though his true love were fur seals that he had studied on South Georgia for two years, in his younger days.The post from which he took a break from to accompany us on the cruise was with the Sea Mammal Research Unit.
As we came to know him better and enjoy the verbal sparing between him an Fritz (the glaciologist) we learnt that his father was called Donald, a name aquired before it was made famous by Walt Disney and that he was a GP in Scotland, known as the local quack!
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The remainder of the morning was split between standing at the stern of the ship watching the birds swooping over the waves and sitting in our cabin.
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Two of the lectures were postponed until a later date but the one 'What is a Marine Mammal' by Shannon Leone Fowler, who had recently completed her PhD studying seal on Kangeroo Island, Australia, did go ahead.
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Southern Giant Petrel
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Stern
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Southern Giant Petrel
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To enable us to get everything fitted in for the day we had an early breakfast at 7.00 followed by a mandatory visitors briefing on protecting the ecology of the Antarctic Region.
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Over lunch we left Stanley to make our way to South Georgia.
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During the afternoon Shannon gave a talk on whales entitled Southern Ocean Cetaceans: Baleen Vs Teeth, followed later by Bob Burton, our naturalist/ historian/ writer with his opening address Shackleton: Heroic Failure?.
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At sea with not too much to do, so breakfast was served later a 8.00 followed by a gentle walk on the after deck to watch the few birds about. It also gave us time to catch up on photos and diaries.
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Later in the morning the Fritz Koerner, the glaciologist talked on Glaciers and Sea Ice followed in the afternoon with Callan's Wildlife of South Georgia.
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In the sunshine
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Wandering Albatross
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Southern Giant Petrel
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As the afternoon wore on the clear skies turned to drizzle and the sea lost some of its calmness. We were told that this was common for the area we were crossing, the Antarctic Convergence, where the cold Antarctic waters that flow along the sea bed rise as they meet the warmer waters of the southern oceans.
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As the afternoon turned to evening the seas became rougher still forcing many passengers to opt for a early night.
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Antarctic (Dove) Prions
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In the morning the seas were still rough and the ship had slowed down to prevent too much bouncing about. But most passengers made it to breakfast and the first lecture of the day ‘Living with Albatross and Fur Seals at South Georgia’, when Callan told us of the time he spent there as a researcher. This was followed by a Shannon talking about Pinnipeds (the collective family of seals, sea lions, walruses etc) and lunch interspersed with periods of standing on the stern and watching the now larger numbers of birds, but not larger varieties as they were mostly southern giant petrels and prions.
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Southern Giant Petrel
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Bow splash
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The afternoon saw yet more rough weather and talks this time on the 'King Penguins of South Georgia' and 'South Georgia : Exploitation, Exploitation, Exploitation !'. Midway through the afternoon we also passed through an area with a prolific population of birds and also whales and seals, unfortunately too far away to photograph.
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A reasonably calm overnight passage brought us a bright sunny morning which became dull later. The morning was mostly taken up with talks, first off was a recap of our stay in South Georgia and then after a break a talk entitled ‘Favourite Heros’ with snippets about both the adventurous and the bazaar.
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For the afternoon we had a short diversion of a large iceberg floating by followed by a tour of the ships engine room.
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Flat topped Iceberg
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Overnight we continued our journey to the South Orkney Islands.
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Cape Petrel (Cape Pigeon)
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Fin Whale
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Fin Whale
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Penguins on Iceberg
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Shore
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South Georgia Shags
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On the way back to the ship we stopped to photograph a couple of Shags sitting on an iceberg.
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Continue on down to Elephant Island taking photos as we went and listening to a talk ‘South Pole – the hard way’
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Iceberg & glacier
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Cape Petrel
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Southern Giant Petrel
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Iceberg
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The morning was again taken up with more talks Poles Apart with Fritz outlining the diverence and similarities between ice at the two poles, and Brush tailed Penguins a talk by Callan on the biology and life-cycles of penguins. The talks were intersperced with watching the icebergs, which were becoming more numerous, float past. The calm seas continued to favour us so that we arrived at our destination of Point Wild on Elephant Island 30 minutes ahead of schedule.
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The crossing of Drake’s Passage to Cape Horn is notoriously rough and although the seas started off reasonably calm, during the day the waves increased. Not as rough as on the first days of the voyage, but enough for some people to take to their beds.
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Outside there was very little to see, no land in sight and no birds following us.
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The day was filled with each of our two young lecturers talking about their current work and the two seniors reminising about times past. Shannon started off with Trials of Adolescence in a Late Bloomer about her PhD thesis on the diving physiology of seals, followed by Bob with When I was a lad - Tales of Old Antarctic.
After lunch Fritz gave us Autobiography of a Glaciologist with Callan ending with Monitoring seal populations about his work with the Sea Mammal Research Unit in Aberdeen.
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Cape Horn
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The seas calmed a little in the night and by the time we reached Cape Horn at 9.30 was just a gentle swell.
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Spent a good deal of the morning discussing the Antarctica Treaty, the ethics of tourism in the Antarctic and IAATO. Followed up with an auction of various artefacts to raise money for the protection of the albatross.
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For an afternoon of doing nothing we were quite busy tying up loose ends, swapping photos etc.
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After a couple of weeks without very much greenery in the landscape the Beagle Channel was something of a contrast.
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Beagle Channel
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During farewell drinks the antipodean passengers gave us a rendition of a song they had written, entitled ‘Sailing Explorer’ to the tune of Waltzing Mattilda,
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Pulled into Ushuaia at 19.00, just in time for our evening meal.
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Awoke early to glorious sunshine. By 7.00, before we went to breakfast, we needed to have our bags packed and labelled with coloured wool to indicate which of the four bus option we were using.
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Another group was joining the ship in the afternoon and so they wanted us off as soon as possible to prepare for them.
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At 8.00 our bus was called and we made our way with our bags through the customs hall, though I can’t think what they expected to find we were illicitly importing from Antarctica.
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Then onto the bus to be swiftly deposited at our hotel.
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The journal ends here with us sitting in the hotel lounge waiting for our room for one night before returning to the UK, making use of a wireless hotspot and free Internet!
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The End
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