Saturday, 16 February 2019

Feb 12, Day 3 Antarctic Peninsula Cruising



Today is day 3 of our Antarctic Experience which has been amazing, far better than we had hoped for and so glad we decided to do this cruise. Today we are sailing through the East Side of Dallman Bay the opposite side to two days ago heading for Charlotte Bay on the way we passed Two Hummock Island which looks a lot like two ice covered volcanoes. Today we have seen Orcas, Humpback and Minke whales unfortunately they don’t seem to like getting their photos taken seen a lot of tails, fins and blowing off, also quite a lot of birds. We saw crab eater seals on a few icebergs they are the most common seals on earth with an estimated number between 20 and 30 million. Charlotte Bay is 10 kilometres wide and Mt Zephelin is the tallest mountain in the bay at a height of 1103 meters. We then sailed to Schollaert Channel and Freud Passage which has La Conte Island on the LHS and Brabant Island on the RHS it was a beautiful passage, but we were unable to go too far into it, as this area has had very minimal surveying done. We saw a stunning iceberg with an arch in it, which was quite large and had some beautiful blue ice. It’s amazing sitting up in the Crows nest the scenery constantly changes, so many icebergs of all different shapes and sizes floating by, wildlife popping up all the time, sky changing colours words and pictures really can’t do it justice. The experts are constantly on the bridge and in the crow’s nest pointing out wildlife and points of interest. 
Gaye, today I asked them your question if penguins have knees and the expert assured me they don’t, they have a very short strong leg bone and for the record this is one of the questions they get asked the most. The captain announced tonight that they have been watching 2 weather fronts for the past 2 days that will impact on us when we sail back through Drakes Passage towards the Falkland Islands so to try and minimise the rough weather, we will be starting back a little bit earlier tomorrow.






No comments:

Post a Comment