Feb 10, Day 1 Antarctic Peninsula Cruising

First up this morning we sailed through Dallmann Bay which is quite stunning, we will be sailing back in this bay on the 12^th but on the opposite side it’s located between Brabant Island and Anvers Island and has lots of icebergs and mountains some completely covered in ice, others with large chunks of granite rock exposed.   After sailing through this bay for about 3 hours we then sailed up to Cuverville Island which is in the Gerlache Strait.  Around the island there were quite a few whale sightings, mainly just blowing off but a few times managed to see their tails.  Some of the ice has a red tinge to it and this is algae, near a few of these spots there were colonies of penguins unfortunately they were hard to see unless you used binoculars as the wind was quite strong and there were a lot of icebergs in the water so the captain couldn’t bring the ship in too close, but so good to see.  As well as penguins on the land we also saw some penguins floating past on icebergs, the scenery is amazing. We had sightings of sea lions, penguins and whales the whole time we were sailing around this island. Later in the afternoon we sailed to Wilhelmina Bay which was stunning with craggy cliff tops, mountains of ice and wildlife which made it a very special place. The sky was quite sunny, and the temperature had gone up a little bit we sailed in this bay for a few hours and saw a few other ships. The Captain advised that once again this has been another rare day as far as weather goes, they haven’t had this good weather here this season or for that, the last few seasons its amazing how wonderful the weather has been. Having said that he then went on to say that there was quite a large number of icebergs in the water so decided it would be safer to sail back out into open water for the night sail and that we could expect swells of between 3 and 4 metres for a few hours about 9pm. The swells ended up being 5 metres and 60 knott winds they locked all the doors to the outside decks, it wasn’t enough to worry us it just rocked us to sleep.