Antarctica blog part two by Cathy de Lara
Part 2: South Georgia to Elephant Island
Our first stop in South Georgia was the old whaling station of Grytviken, here the old buildings and machinery form a whaling museum. There is also a post office, a church, and the grave of Ernest Shackleton where we toasted his memory with Shackleton whiskey.
The area is now home to thousands of young Fur seals, they were everywhere and were soooo cute! They would charge at us trying (and failing) to be fierce, they would get to within a metre of us then turn and run away again! In the afternoon we dived at Godthul, another kelp forest full of starfish, sponges and tunicates. On the surface whilst we were waiting for the boat, a juvenile Giant Petrel (and yes, he was huge!) kept trying to peck at his reflection in my camera dome, I tried shooing him away, but he kept coming back, John was no help he just kept laughing!
The next morning, we were up early for a zodiac cruise and shore visit to the stunning St Andrews Bay, home to 450,000 king penguins it was just like being in a David Attenborough documentary! The afternoon was another kelp forest dive at Cooper bay
The next day was our first iceberg dive, the viz wasn’t great as the berg was bumping on the bottom stirring the silt, but we still got to see the beautiful ice (and experience the buoyancy changes as you get closer to the ice and the water changes from salt to fresh).
That night the winds got up to hurricane force, 83 knots (95.5 mph), not unusual in this part of the world.
South Georgia is beautiful, with green, grassy mountains, glaciers lots of different penguins, (including big rafts of swimming King penguins at Salisbury plain), outrageously cute fur seals and big, grumpy Elephant seals (grumpy because they are moulting).
Then it was time to cross the Scotia Sea to South Orkney, a journey that took another day, but we did pass iceberg A23 and lots of Humpback whales.
South Orkney had Fin and humpback whales, we did another dive with colourful sponges, tunicates and nudibranchs and this is where the water became cold enough for us to experience our regulators starting to freeze.
Our final stop before the Antarctic peninsula was Point Wild on Elephant Island, made famous when Shackleton’s crew lived here for 4 months whilst waiting for rescue. We couldn’t land but had a party (hot chocolate with rum) on the back deck.