15th – Whale, whale, whale… What do we have here?

We had our wakeup call at 0730 and breakfast half an hour later. We quickly realized that the conditions had improved significantly during the night and we were down to only a few people not feeling well, improving the general mood on the ship.

Soft-plumaged petrel.

The morning was relatively uneventful with a presentation on zodiac regulations and the one on environmental safety. We also had to have anything we were planning on bringing off the ship (bags and outer layers) cleaned/vacuumed for anything potential harmful for the local environment. Apart from that we spent most our time standing outside trying to spot anything interesting, having the open seas behind us and now with land on both sides of the ship when going through the Nelson Strait.

First sighting of land.

Lunch was had and shortly after we had a lecture on penguins followed by anchoring near two islands; Cecilia and Barrientos island. Those who hadn’t signed up for kayaking on the trip were split into 2 groups to ease the amount of pressure on each island. I started on Cecilia where we saw a handful of penguins but quite a few nesting giant petrels, but otherwise a climb up to the highest point on the island giving a good view of the surrounding area. 

Brown skua.

Having come down again we took the zodiacs to Barrientos where there were a lot of nesting penguins, and some of them had already eggs in their nests. We were also very lucky to see a leopard seal, crabeater seals, weddell seal and a female elephant seal (and as it was female it didn’t have the characteristic snout).

Leopard seal.

Gentoo penguin.

Chinstrap penguin (with gentoos in the background).

Egg!

A gentoo bringing a pebble to its nest.

I had never expected the problem I was suddenly facing when standing among the many penguins; my 200-500mm lens I was using for wildlife was turning into being too much. The penguins were very close so you didn’t need any kind of large zoom lens to have a chance of getting some good shots. They generally ignored us and otherwise just walked around us, some eyeing us suspiciously. The realization that they were not the least afraid of us was quite amazing and very unexpected.

We returned to the ship and around 1800 we had started relocating to the next place to be, further south to another island where they expect us to arrive around 0300. At around the same time we had our daily evening briefing where we had the official welcome by the ship’s captain, dinner at 1900 and afterwards the camping people were asked to show up for a presentation and talk on the hows and whats when going camping. The plan is, if the forecast holds, that we will be going camping already tomorrow evening.

It is to be said, though, that staff pointed out the weather we have had today is very non-Antarctic. It has only been slightly clouded and temps reaching close to 10°C before lunch (but with winds making it feel colder). We are crossing our fingers that it will stay like this, at least until after we have been camping. But Antarctica being Antarctica the weather can change violently with very or no notice.

Around 2200 we were notified that whales had been spotted. The spray had been seen but the whales did not make themselves particularly visible, despite being only a couple of hundred meters from the ship. The educated guess from staff and crew was that it had been fin whales. (later reports concluded that one of them might actually have been a blue whale).

(Potentially a) blue whale.