Well.
That was a bit of a day. The ship anchored off Bailey Head, on the east of Deception Island, at 10.30am; by 11am the first Zodiacs were heading for shore. Bailey Head is the HQ of rather a lot of chinstrap penguins: an estimated 80,000 at the moment. Most of them were at home today. I had two hours ashore, landing on a black volcanic beach and hiking up across the ice to a ridge overlooking the colony. How many photos? Er, about 800. Photogenic little folk, chinstrap penguins.
And they make rather a lot of noise, which is how they recognise eachother: they can't tell eachother by sight, because they all look very, well, penguiny.
Even from the ship, they were an impressive sight, porpoising through the water in groups of 20 or so, but close-up they're just wonderful. We're not supposed to get closer to them than 15 feet, but the penguins don't know that – they just wander up, cast a quizzical glance ("yes? Can I help you?") and then wander off again like small monochrome Charlie Chaplins.
Back on board for a quick lunch and a frantic photo-upload session, and then we sailed through Neptune's Bellows (a rather narrow passage between sheer cliffs) into the flooded caldera of the volcano (which is what Deception Island is: not an island but a volcano. Deceptive...) The shoreline was inaccessible, being guarded by up to a mile of ice, so the ship had to stop – by ramming the aforesaid ice and burying itself a few hundred yards into it. Better go for a stroll, then...
Down came the steps, and out poured the ship's population onto the ice: utterly bizarre, and a tad nippy underfoot. I gather that a Russian icebreaker has been stuck in pack ice in the Weddell Sea (about 100 miles away) for 10 days now, so they're probably getting a bit bored of it, but our assembled company had a splendid time taking the obligatory "look at me, I'm pulling the ship" photos and not jumping up and down (just in case.)
Before leaving Deception Island, we pulled into Whaler's Bay so that three lunatics could swim (wallow) in the thermal-vent-heated (to about 3 degrees above freezing) water, one partial lunatic (me) could stand on the windy foredeck and take too many photos of the abandoned whaling station, and everybody else (i.e. the sensible ones) could huddle in the lounge with hot drinks and say "wow" to eachother. A lot.
As if all that wasn't surreal enough, in a few minutes it's "Captain's Cocktail Hour." I think that means for everyone, not just the captain.
We're now heading south again, with a view to arriving somewhere else incredible in the morning...
