During the night we rounded the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula then headed south-east, into the Weddell Sea.
At 9.30 there was, as Ralph the National Geographic photo boffin put it, a photography emergency: tabular icebergs stretching in all directions, flat-topped floating giants with sheer cliff edges, some the size of football pitches, some as big as towns. The sea was flat calm and the sky sunny: as the ship zigzagged between the walls of ice, there was much clicking of shutters and saying of "wow".
By 1pm we'd anchored just off Brown Bluff, a volcanic beach beneath snowy slopes leading to a towering cliff face at the northeastern edge of the Antarctic mainland. On the slopes were gentoo and Adelie penguin nesting sites, the two separate groups occupying the same physical space like a seabird Jerusalem. I was ashore for four hours, watching the nesting pairs and capturing the marvellous cacophony on an audio recorder.
This evening we continued south until we hit fast ice (thin but unpassable ice bound to the shore): the captain ran the ship into it (a not very subtle way of parking for the night) and tomorrow the weather will dictate what we can do
One last piece of excitement this evening: the ship having stopped, Ian the bird bloke looked out along the edge of the ice (there are penguins and seals hauled out all along the ice edge for miles in each direction) and – using some sort of ornithological super-power – spotted an Emperor penguin over a kilometre away from the ship. We didn't expect to see Emperors, we're at the far northern extremity of their range. Even with the absurd abundance of long lenses on the ship it was impossible to get a good photo at this distance, but just seeing the thing through binoculars was a treat.
