As we wouldn’t be boarding until 1530 I had most of the day to kill. Being in Ushuaia there wasn’t much to do so I checked out at the latest possible time and handed my bag over to the ship’s crew who would be taking it on board. The rest of the time was spent relaxing when not going out for lunch.
The view of Ushuaia from the small local airstrip.
At 1530 I showed up at the pickup point and bumped into one of the guides that I had met on one of my previous tours and who would also be on this one. It was fantastic to meet him again and it was clear I was not the only passenger who recognized him. We all boarded the busses that would take us to the ship, and while it distance-wise would have been much faster walking, due to the two other cruise ships also getting ready to depart there was a huge line outside the security checkpoint to the harbor and using the busses was therefore in the end faster.
The original plan of the tour was to leave Ushuaia and head east to the Falkland Islands and further to South Georgia before turning south and going to Antarctica before returning north to Ushuaia. Unfortunately the Falklands were at the time being hammered by strong winds which would mean that when we’d arrive there would be a high risk that we’d be stuck for days. The current forecast for the Falklands were 8m waves and 60-70 knot winds (we later heard that it ended up being 10m and 90 knot winds which had resulted in a ship had arrived in port with damages which would have been the same result for us if we had stuck with the original plan). Instead the decision was made among the guides and ship’s captain to reverse the direction of the tour and instead start off by heading south and visiting South Georgia and the Falklands last, hoping that the weather would have calmed enough to make a visit manageable.
A peale's dolphin spotted in the Beagle channel, just a few hours out of Ushuaia.
The crossing of the Drake was very calm though the visibility was almost non-existent. It was so calm that the crew invited us for ice cream on the stern deck at one point. All this meant that the passing could be done at a good speed and we arrived in Antarctica in less than two days. Arriving we first reached Dallmann Bay and almost as on cue the weather cleared and we had a wonderful view of the continent.
And what a welcome we received. Before this trip I had been hoping to see orcas and breaching whales. I have never seen the former in the wild and the latter only once very far away on and beyond the horizon. We hadn’t been near land for long before we found ourselves near the Melchior Islands and in the middle of several pods of orcas, totaling somewhere between 40 and 50 individuals of almost all sizes. The captain turned off the engines and so we just floated along with them for an hour before the engines were started again and we left them alone. I could barely imagine a better start to the trip than this!
Orcas!
The first of many stunning sights.
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