Incredibly, today managed to surpass even the previous amazing few days for, er, amazingness. On deck at 7am for the desperately photogenic passage southwards through the Lemaire Channel: seven miles long, one mile wide, it separates Booth Island from the mainland of Antarctica. That'll be another 300 photos, then.
The ship anchored at the southern end of the Channel; following a quick breakfast we took to the boats – kayaks, in fact, for an hour or two of paddling about between (very small) icebergs. Then we landed and explored the penguin colonies on Booth Island: gentoo, chinstrap and Adelie penguins sharing a neighbourhood. The French explorer Charcot wintered here in 1909, and the remains of his huts are still here.
Back to the ship for lunch, and then we headed south. There's ice as far as the eye can see (which, in the ultra-clear air, is a very long way indeed) – all sizes, from huge icebergs (miles wide) down to the stuff that would go jolly nicely in a G&T (albeit a rather salty one.) The ship is ice-strengthened, and can barge straight through a lot of it. I spent the afternoon on deck photographing icebergs – most white, some mottled, some a vivid blue - and the increasingly surreal icy seascape with its backdrop of glacier-covered mountains along all horizons.
The day's highlight arrived at about 5pm: a crabeater seal was spotted on an ice floe a mile ahead, and one of the naturalists reckoned he'd seen a large fin nearby. The ship sneaked (as much as a walloping great ship CAN sneak) up to the ice floe – despite that part of the channel being uncharted (eek) – and we had a good look at the seal, but no other creatures appeared. The seal gave us a nonchalant shrug and slid into the sea; we turned south again but, within minutes, a family of Killer Whales breached right in front of us. There were seven or eight of them, and over the next hour they repeatedly disappeared and reappeared (at one point passing under the ship) and we all gave thanks for long lenses and big memory cards.
We're now continuing southwards – we're already further south than any expedition ship has been this season, and we're going to see how far we can get before the ice becomes impassable. The ideal goal would be to cross the Antarctic Circle, but in this part of the continent the pack ice usually extends too far north to allow it; the likelihood is that we'll encounter pack ice somewhere in the Grandidier Channel this evening, at which point we'll have a celebratory snifter and turn back.
Capping the day's extraordinary events, I can now call my autobiography "Neil Armstrong Borrowed My Binoculars."
