Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Farewell, Antarctic Peninsula

Wednesday 28 February 2024 – I have no idea what plan we’re up to, but the briefings that Pippa gives us every evening about the prospects for the following day make me believe that we’re working our way steadily through the alphabet as weather changes and conditions at potential landing sites become clearer.

The original plan for today had been a landing on D’Hainaut Island, where there are the remains of a whaling operation and, goodness me, some penguins, followed by a cruise around Mikkelsen Harbour. For those idiots hardy souls who wanted this, there was also the Polar Plunge – the opportunity to swim in the Antarctic Ocean.  On looking out of the cabin window first thing this morning, it was clear that the luck with the weather which had seen us through the first few days had really deserted us.

Winds were 25 knots.  I’m only passing familiar with the Beaufort wind scale, and I haven’t got Google to look it up for you; but I do know that a 30-knot wind is pretty much gale force 8.  The 25 knots that we did have was sufficient to ensure that the rain lashed more across than down. It was also sufficiently strong that the Zodiac cruise was cancelled. For Jane and me, the decision to have no part of the day’s expeditions was easily and swiftly made; after all, we’d seen a good number of gentoo penguins already and I wasn’t prepared to risk my Nikon in the persisting rain. Coffee in the lounge was a more attractive proposition. We could see the landing area

and even make out some detail of the whaling shed,

and that was good enough for us.  Jane spotted an iceberg with a face on it

and, as we departed D’Hainaut Island, vigorous use of the “clarify” slider on my image processing software revealed that there would have been a great view were it not for the fog.

And (again, courtesy of computer software) we caught what turned out to be our last glimpse of the Antarctic peninsula as we headed north

to exactly what, we weren’t sure, but we had been warned to expect some rougher seas as we went through the Bransfield Strait, which separates the South Shetlands and the Antarctic Peninsula.

During the afternoon, we had a couple of interesting lectures.  One from Meike about Antarctic Krill, the small, shrimp-like creatures which not only form a key link in the food chain, since just about all the local wildlife depend on them, but also operate a significant carbon sink as they feed on algae on the base of sea ice, then sink and deposit carbon on the sea bed in the form of their excretions.

The other was from Pelin, who expertly took us through one of the remarkable rescue stories of the heroic era of Antarctic exploration – the Norrskjöld expedition of 1901-03. This involved three exploration parties who had become separated from each other, each in a different area off the Antarctic Peninsula and state of distress (e.g ship destroyed by ice, being confined to a tent for months during an Antarctic winter, that kind of thing) setting off to try to find each other and, rather improbably, succeeding. Even more incredibly, a rescue ship, which had been dispatched (because the exploration ship hadn’t returned when it should have) with instructions to find them, even more improbably succeeded.  In all, a party of 20 men was saved, with only one death, probably from a chest infection.

After this, everyone eagerly awaited Pippa’s recap which would be the point at which we found out what was on the cards.

It was enlightening to listen to the process that Pippa and the team had gone through.  For example, the first thought was to go to the Antarctic Sound, at the tip of the Peninsula, to view some of what Otto Norrskjöld had seen on his expedition.

But the captain had seen the weather forecast

(hint: red and purple are the highest wind speeds) and said “no”, or more likely “nyet”.  Various other possibilities were discussed, but in all cases the winds were too strong.  And so we took our leave of the Antarctic Peninsula for the last time and headed out on our route towards Elephant Island

and more specifically to Point Wild

so named for reasons I will come to in the next post, but which has great historic and emotional significance for anyone who knows the Shackleton story.

The recap session also featured several short talks. Annelou spoke on the topic of the Antarctic ice, how it varies over the course of a year and how it ages in different ways.

Rose discussed the several versions of “South Pole” there are, starting with the obvious geographic south pole, which is where all the lines of longitude meet (altitude 2835m above sea level, the top 2.7 kilometres of which is ice);

and covering the other four (2 is the magnetic south pole, 3 the geomagnetic pole, whose explanation I couldn’t quite grasp and, of course, can’t easily Google), 4 the pole of inaccessibility (84° S,64° E), which is furthest from all of the coasts, and 5, the ceremonial south pole, where the flags of the 12 original sharing nations were erected but which has now moved with the ice away from the actual geographic south pole (I hope you are keeping up at the back…?).

Joyce discussed the heroic efforts of humpback whales to foil the killing exploits of orcas.  Apparently orcas can take humpback whale calves, and, unsurprisingly, humpbacks take the, erm, hump at this and have developed ways of chasing orcas away; this extends to orca attacks on other species, not just other whales.

The evening ended with an after-dinner presentation. Sasha, in his usual idiosyncratic and droll way, told us how his journey through life led to him being in the Antarctic after five years serving in Pyramiden, the Russian ghost town in the Arctic, via his first journey on a very idiosyncratic aircraft, the Ilyushin 76.

With the increasing pitching and rolling of Hondius indicating that we were in more open water, we headed for bed, with the enticing prospect of Elephant Island and more detail on the Shackleton story awaiting us in the morning.

 

 

Gen 2

Tuesday 27 February 2024 – Our luck with the Antarctic weather looked to be running out as we peered at the morning’s prospects from the cabin.

There was a stiff breeze (about 10 knots, we were told) and it was raining. The only redeeming feature, and it was only a marginal redemption, was that the temperature was above freezing – about 2°C.

We were parked in Salpetriere Bay, known as the “Iceberg Graveyard”, because the vagaries of prevailing wind and currents tend to shepherd passing icebergs into the bay such that they can’t then float out again.  Thus it seemed that a Zodiac cruise around the bay should give us some great icescapes.

It did.

It also gave us a great wildlife experience, one which I hadn’t expected and, indeed, one which even the guides found remarkable.

But first the scenery.  It was spectacular.

This was my favourite among the many scenes we enjoyed on the morning expedition.

We had been told that there were colonies of gentoo penguins in the bay, and so there were.

The ones above look quite neat and tidy in their back-and-white dinner suit outfits.  The colony as a whole

not so much.  The pinky-brown stuff is penguin shit.  And there’s a lot of it. Really, a lot.

The individual penguins are very penguinish.

Many of them are chicks or adults which are moulting and hence couldn’t go into the water.

Also on the wildlife front, I tried to capture a few shots of the birdlife around.  There were some shags on the rocks and several kelp gulls.  This one is an adult.

And a juvenile or two were flying around.

We also saw an Antarctic tern. We weren’t anywhere near its nest, so it wasn’t in attack mode.

Some of the penguins were in the water and were skipping about madly.

This tactic, called “porpoising”, is how they move at their fastest, some 35kph.  And we managed to catch sight of the reason why.

A leopard seal, the only seal species in these parts which eats penguins.  This was the unexpected treat for both us passengers and the guides.  These seals are solitary and elusive and some of the guides had rarely seen them.  This one was very curious about us

and came and played around our Zodiac, and the other ones that were in the same area as we were.  The water was clear enough that we could see it actually swimming around and under the boat, so we had several minutes in its company.

Extraordinarily, it was not the only leopard seal in the bay.  We came across another, basking on an ice floe,

which gave us a chance to see its snake-like, evil and Voldemortish head.

Amazingly, there was yet another, also basking,

which, like the others, was the centre of considerable attention.

Leopard seals are probably the most voracious of the seals, in that they prey on a huge variety of other creatures, including baby seals of other species, as well as penguins, fish and the ubiquitous krill.  To deal efficiently with the latter, they have evolved teeth of a special shape which close together to form a filter; the seals can take a mouthful of water and krill, and expend the water through clenched teeth, leaving just the krill to eat.

Crabeater seals (whose pups are prey for the leopard seals) also have this tooth configuration, as almost their entire diet is krill.  Leopard seals, on the other hand, have also got fearsome canines and strong jaws which allow them to catch and bite their other prey.  We were told not to put a hand in the water, as a bite from a leopard seal could actually take it off.

That was our wildlife treat for the morning, alongside the spectacular icescapes of the iceberg graveyard.  The afternoon had the possibility of a landing at a nearby site, reached after a short move by Hondius to a place called Port Charcot. Calling it a port rather overstates its extent.

On the top left you can just make out a cairn, which is a not to Jean Charcot, who was a Frenchman who made two noted expeditions mapping the Antarctic Peninsula in the early 20th century. He was part of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration between 1901 and 1920, during which thousands of kilometres of the coastline were mapped; the era included the Shackleton debacle and the Scott-Amundsen competition.

Those who were interested could walk up to the cairn; there was also a reasonably substantial colony of gentoo penguins on the island.  It was really quite windy and there was also a fair bit of rain in the air, moving more horizontally than vertically. On that basis, the visit to the cairn held few attractions for Jane and me, and we contented ourselves with stumbling and sliding our way to the penguins

across snow and ice which was lavishly decorated by algae, turning it green, and penguin shit, turning it also brown.

As is the norm with penguins, they were behaving in agreeably penguinish ways; I have video but internet bandwidth constraints mean it’s not practical to share it, I’m afraid.  There were adults feeding chicks;

penguins eating snow as a source of “fresh” water*,

which must be quite a test for their digestive system, I’d have thought; and several penguin highways, routes from the colony to the sea etched out by thousands of laborious penguin journeys.

The colonies tend to be high up because gentoos need rocks upon which to build nests (normally by stealing stones from their neighbours’ construction efforts), and the tops of hills is often where the snow is first cleared by the wind; hence the need for the journey from sea to colony.

The net effect is that the whole area is covered in penguin poo,

so being careful with one’s footing is very desirable.  You can’t avoid stepping in it, but you can at least try not to fall over in it, something that a couple of our landing party failed to do.

After a while of watching the penguins, we decided to head back down and go back to the boat.  The landing area was near one of the spots where the penguins entered the water

and we could see them porpoising around in the water close to the shore as they sought food (again, I have video, but blah blah).

It is impossible to walk there without getting one’s boots covered in penguin excrement, which is not something to be transported back to the boat: partly because that would possibly spread unwelcome biological material to where it shouldn’t be; and also because it stinks.  So the team take care to ensure that boots are well cleaned before you are allowed back on to a Zodiac.

Even so, clean as we were were on arrival to Hondius, there seemed to be a pervasive pong of penguin poo hanging around for a while afterwards.

That was it for the day’s excursions, but there was still some visual entertainment to come as Hondius was carefully steered up the narrow Lemaire Channel,

which, we were told, is one of the most dramatic and most-photographed pieces of coastline.  Obviously the best place to see the scenery from would be the bow of the ship.  But it was bloody freezing, raining and blowing a gale, so I, like other sensible souls, retired to the bridge to watch the scenery go by through windows which were obligingly cleaned by the large windscreen wipers there.

There were a few idiots hardy souls who braved the bow.  There always are.

The hour or so spent gingerly creeping along the channel was a perfect exemplar of the standard Walker holiday mantra: “it would have been better if it were clearer”.

It was obvious that the scenery was dramatic; I just wish we could have seen more of it.

It’s a very narrow channel, littered with ice

as you can see from the radar plot.

After a while the fog really came down and so I retired to the bar for a G&T and waited for the briefing for the morrow.  The destination, which is a fair bit north, is Mikkelsen Harbour at D’Hainaut Island, where can be found the remains of a whaling station and more gentoo penguins.  The weather prospects are less than stellar so it may well be that we will spurn the opportunity to get cold, wet and caked in penguin poo in favour of a calm and orderly morning. Time will tell.

 

* Gentoo penguins can drink salt water (just as well, really) and they have a special gland on their forehead through which they can excrete the salt. A tricky choice, I’d have said – which tastes better, ocean water or shitty snow?

Detaille Oriented

Monday 26 February 2024 – The morning dawned somewhat greyer and rather windier than I would frankly have liked.

But the weather was still, equally frankly, a lot more benign than it might have been.  There were two items on the plan today, the first of which was a visit to a disused British research base dating from the 1940s, Base W, on Detaille Island.  From the warmth of our cabin we saw the teams headed out to prepare a landing area

and if you know where to look, you can see the base in the picture above.  There it is, top left. You can see it more clearly below.

Our Orange group was due to do a short Zodiac cruise before making the landing, and we were hosted for that by the very droll Sasha.  The conditions weren’t great – 0°C, a little snowy drizzle in the air and just windy enough to make things a little uncomfortable – but we saw, as ever, some great icescapes

and a reasonably substantial colony of Adelie penguins.

Many of them were milling about by the water’s edge

and Sasha explained that what was going on was a sort of group negotiation about getting into the water. An individual going in might be caught by a passing predator, but if a group could all go in at the same time, individual chances of survival were better; so it was a game of “after you, Claude”, “no, after you, Cecil”.  This groupthink actually resulted in none of them going in whilst we were watching, which is a bit of a shame. One solitary penguin seemed to be trying to tell us something

but we don’t know what, since we don’t speak penguin (I wonder if it’s related to pidgin…?).

After a bit more desultory cruising, we made our landing on the island

and stumbled up a somewhat icy path to the hut that housed the main part of the base.

We had a short history briefing from Pelin as we stood outside the entrance.

She explained a little about the geopolitical games which surrounded the establishment of these research bases, but the idea mainly was to establish territorial rights before some other buggers got in and tried it on.  The first British base was Base A, and so you can work out that Base W was established some time later, sometime in the late 1940s.  It didn’t last long, as a really harsh winter forced an evacuation, which was carried out via a 30-kilometre dog sled pull across sea ice to Base Y (Base W actually had some 20 working dogs – more than the number of personnel – which were housed in separate kennels). The harsh conditions started to destroy the buildings and they have been only relatively recently excavated from the snow which had engulfed them, lovingly restored by volunteers and established as a historic site.  Clearly, as such, it has to be treated with respect, and no more than 12 people are allowed in at any one time.  But one can go in and inside it’s like a time capsule.

After spending time looking around inside the hut, we walked a little up the hillside to take in the overall view, which was spectacular, if somewhat difficult to capture in a single image.

Then we stumbled and slipped our way back down to the landing area

to take a ride back to Hondius. It was by this stage snowing reasonably obviously, and the wind had got up a little more, so we declined the option of a further Zodiac cruise in favour of a hot chocolate and a bit of a sit down.

After lunch, at which we had a really interesting chat with Judy and Knox, a North American couple who had lived and worked in China in the 1990s, the original plan had been to go to Hanusse Bay for a further look-round.  But the prevailing conditions didn’t make that a particularly inviting prospect,

so Pippa and the team decided to start heading back Oop Narth to cross back over the Antarctic Circle and head to our next place instead. It’s not, at this very moment, completely clear where that will be, but I’m sure it will be worth the wait; and in any case, after all the relentless expeditioning of the last days, it was nice to have an afternoon off.

We visited the bridge, which is an oasis of calm

even as quite a lot of attention has to be paid to not bumping into things as we go.

We were also able to pick up the certificates which proved that we’d crossed the Antarctic Circle.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring?  At the moment, not I, but you can be sure that I’ll let you know what actually happened as soon as circumstances permit.