Tag Archives: Scenery

Falkland Islands 3 – New Island

Sunday 11 March 2024 – Overnight from Carcass to New Island was “not too bad”, a phrase which has been a running joke throughout this whole trip.  When Pippa and the skipper first discussed our overall route and a possible transit through the Drake Passage, the major decision to reverse the direction of our entire outing and make it anticlockwise was done on the basis that the captain’s view was that the wind forecast was “not too bad” – apparently the most sanguine description he ever gives of weather possibilities.  With the exception of maybe two nights, our transits from place to place have been “not too bad”, i.e. absolutely bloody miraculous.  It has been astonishing how good our weather has been, to the point where I was considering (jokingly) the possibility of submitting a complaint about the trip because it wasn’t the “authentic Antarctic experience”.

Anyway, not too bad.

We were able, courtesy of some more skillful navigation from the captain, to get quite near New Island. You can see from the state of the sea that it was pretty breezy.

Closer examination shows it to be a settlement that’s a little more substantial than the one we’d recently visited at Carcass.

Indeed, it has its own shipwreck

and a small but beautifully formed museum

dedicated to supporting the New Island Conservation Trust. This was originally set up by the two co-owners of the island to ensure that it never got exploited and was always a conservation area for wildlife.

Outside, the museum has a gentoo penguin statue

and inside

there’s a lot of information about the trust, many relevant artifacts from the surrounding area

as well as an opportunity to indulge in some retail therapy.

Having perused the place, we started the relatively short walk towards another black-browed albatross colony. On the way, we passed kelp geese,

more of the ubiquitous upland geese

and more rockhoppers using cormorants for added security against marauding skuas,

but the albatrosses were the main objective of the excursion.

An albatross is a big bird and, like the cormorant, one that a skua won’t fuck about with, hence the rockhoppers get the added protection.  The location shown above is also a good demonstration of why rockhoppers get their name, since they’ve clearly hopped up all those rocks to get to a place of relative security.

There were cormorants among the other birds, too;

these were imperial cormorants, distinguished by white on the front of their necks and those yellow-orange eye decorations.

It was windy. Again.  And, as well as some dramatic cliff scenery,

there was tucking fussock grass. Again.

It really was somewhere between “trying” and “dangerous” to find places to watch the penguins and albatrosses – but ultimately rewarding.

The rockhoppers are very engaging creatures

and the wind made their hairstyle very distinctive

and clearly left them at times severely unimpressed.

The albatrosses were feeding their chicks, each residing on the nest that they won’t leave until they can fly.  They’re very demanding.

and it was interesting to watch the way their demands affected the parents.

After a while it was time to head back, this time thankfully with the wind behind us, to the boat, but the final image that stayed with me was this extremely punk rockhopper.

For Jane and me, this was our last landing on the Falklands.  Pippa organised another one, more to the north of New Island, but, frankly, both of us were pretty tuckered out by this stage, and the northern landing didn’t hold the prospect of seeing anything dramatically different from what we’d already seen.  So we awarded ourselves our second Afternoon Off. Which was delightful, I have to say.

And now we had to leave. After our time in the Falklands, all that remained was a Sea Day whilst we headed back to Ushuaia and the end of three weeks exploring Antarctica and the Southern Ocean Islands. We simply hoped that the weather would continue to be “not too bad”.  One of the other captains in the Oceanwide Adventures fleet reportedly has another weather saying: “One day, you’ll pay”. We had to hope that  maybe it wouldn’t be down to us to pick up this particular bill.

 

Falkland Islands 2 – Carcass

Sunday 10  March 2024 (pm) – The stabilisers on Hondius did a good job of countering the waves as the ship was carefully navigated around to Carcass Island, also off West Falkland; the wind was still strong, but the landing area looked calm enough.

We landed near a settlement and – praise be! – there was a jetty.

Mind you, because of the state of the tide and the slime at the foot of the jetty, we had to disembark part way up, which was a bit of a step up.

There were, broadly speaking, two options for the afternoon: stay near the landing area and drop into the settlement for tea and cakes; or go for a longish walk before dropping into the settlement for tea and cakes.  I suppose there might have been an option which didn’t include tea and cakes, but no-one seemed interested in that one.

On the path to the settlement, a tussac bird checked us out.

(I assume that the “tussac” in the name of this bird means the same as the more familiar “tussock”.  On several occasions we have had to deal with tussock grass, which, believe me, is not just grass growing in tussocks, oh dear me no. In the Falklands and South Georgia it is a specific plant, Poa Flabbelata, as any fule kno, whose growth builds an ever-increasing pedestal which supports its leaves and can grow up to the height of a man.  This provides shelter for animals and a major trip hazard for humans. For example, one passenger on Hondius had been medevacked on his first attempt to do this trip because the tussock grass concealed a hole which caused his ankle to break in spectacular fashion.)

So, off we went on the walk along a track normally used by local 4x4s.

The info we’d been given asserted that this walk was a chance to see local wildlife, and I suppose it was, provided what you wanted to see was upland geese. There were loads of them,

but for most of the walk out, very little else.  Jane spotted a dark-faced ground tyrant and I managed to catch it before it buggered off,

but apart from that and a few kelp geese spotted in the distance

there was nothing on offer on a long and, frankly, dull walk.

After a couple of wildlifeless kilometres, we decided to turn back, and discovered that what was dull became tedious in the extreme, as we had to stumble back against the infamous Falkland Island wind.  It really was hard work, with the only photographic reward being the spotting by Jane of a couple of magellanic penguins standing guard on their burrows.

I guess I’m being a bit harsh in describing the walk as dull – under other circumstances a bracing walk through the countryside in streaming sunshine would be a pleasure. But I felt that an expedition-style outing should have a bit more pith and moment – or just make it a brief stop for tea, cakes and a look at the wildlife around the landing area.

Having struggled back against the wind, it was nice to get into the house where the tea and cakes were on offer (we had to take off our Muck boots before hand, which is not too surprising, as there was a certain amount of mud around on the paths).  It was an impressive spread

and the tea was very welcome.  Everyone rhapsodised about the how wonderful the baked goods were, but actually I wasn’t as impressed as they were; I thought the chocolate stuff wasn’t chocolatey enough, the shortbread wasn’t quite as sweet as I like, and the macaroons were nice enough but not quite the melt-in-the-mouth treat that a proper macaroon can be. They had ginger biscuits, which were nice, and Jane gave the mince pies the thumbs-up; and it was nice to have a rest after struggling along against that relentless wind.

It was less fun to discover, when I got outside, that someone had taken one of my boots and left one of theirs which was slightly, but tellingly, smaller.  It wasn’t a disaster, but it didn’t help my mood having to hobble back to the landing area with one painful foot.  Not even seeing an austral thrush could lift my spirits much.

The tea house had effectively a pet caracara which entertained the guests for food,

and we had further entertainment at the boot-scrubbing party which was a necessary precursor to getting the Zodiac back to Hondius.

After this somewhat dull interval, the day finished with a flourish, though.  Our one-time Stanley resident, Martin, had extolled the beauties of Falkland Islands sunset, and as we headed out of the bay towards our next rendezvous, we were treated to a great display.

The next day, we were due to visit another West Falkland Island, New Island, which also held the promise of seeing some more albatross action – if the conditions allowed.  But the wind was rising, and we would have to wait until the following morning to see what was possible.

 

The Scenic South Orkneys

Friday 1 March 2024­ – In following Shackleton’s route, i.e. heading towards South Georgia, the benign conditions and lack of icebergs in the way had enabled the skipper to make sufficiently good progress that Pippa could plan an extra stop, rather than just blatting our way directly to South Georgia.  So we found ourselves at Shingle Cove, which is on Coronation Island, part of the South Orkneys.  In sunshine! And light winds!!

The sunshine made the scenery quite spectacular.

 

But equally, we could see that we were in Iceberg Alley, so once again the captain had done a good job of not bumping into anything.

This meant we could undertake a brief expedition from Hondius. The specifics of the timing meant a slightly unusual sequence of events – Blue Group went before lunch and Orange Group after – but it was nice to get off the ship in light winds and sunshine.

The landing area was, unsurprisingly, a shingle beach, or at least a beach with small stones on it rather than inconveniently large boulders. Right by where we climbed out of the Zodiacs were several elephant seals, one of which, although not a full-grown adult, was quite huge.

You can see that his size dwarfs the other seals on the same stretch of beach.  You could tell he wasn’t full grown because his nose hadn’t grown out into the elephantine proboscis that marks out adult elephant seals; but you can see it starting to develop.

Even if he wasn’t fully grown, he was nonetheless an impressive sight.

Eventually he got fed up with people staring at him and lumbered off to face away from us, looking like nothing so much as a grumpy Vogon.  Well, all Vogons are grumpy, so I suppose that’s a bit tautological.

The views from the island continued to be spectacular.

but there were other things to be seen apart from just the view. Turning one way led us to a glacier that was unusual in that it debouched on to land rather than the sea.

And heading the other way led to what was once a colony of penguins.  Since all the chicks had fledged, there were actually very few penguins left

and the main inhabitants of the island were seals, mainly elephant but with a leavening of fur seals.

There was somewhat gruesome evidence of the demise of many penguins

but we weren’t sure whether these had been predated or had just expired.  There were skuas around

and these are sufficiently nasty pieces of work that they might p-pick a p-penguin if they felt p-peckish.

The rocks that lay around on the walk were very colourful in places

and the paths that the landing party had marked out for us with red poles led past rocks decorated with moss and a striking orange lichen

that we were enjoined to be careful not to walk on, as it is fragile and takes centuries to grow.  And all the way along our walks there were more seals, all of whom were evidently conserving energy, since they moved not a muscle as we went by.

One of the main reasons for their lack of movement was that they are moulting.  Like penguins, these seals undergo what’s called a “catastrophic moult”.  Here’s a good example.

During the moult, they cannot go into the water to feed, so conserving energy is an important tactic.

Apart from the bit where I fell over, slightly damaging both my camera and my wife in the same moment of clumsiness*, the expedition was a delight, partly because of the scenery and partly because of the sunshine.  We headed back to Hondius, which eventually set off in the general direction of South Georgia, passing south of the South Orkneys and providing the passengers with views of blowing whales and some more wonderful scenery.

There were many vast icebergs, as big as apartment blocks.

 

There were also a handful of fishing vessels nearby

which we reckon were probably fishing for krill.  Whilst this is not illegal, there are supposed to be quotas for krill fishing; but there’s no policing mechanism, and there is a significant danger (and some evidence) of krill overfishing.  Although these small shrimp-like creatures are astonishingly plentiful, the human appetite for them for purposes that are unnecessary – omega-3 supplements, skin care products, dog food (!) and, most irritatingly of all, food that will turn farmed salmon a more marketable shade of pink – is not only endangering the food chain, since practically everything is utterly dependent upon krill, but also contributing to climate change, since Antarctic krill (if left to themselves) sequester more carbon from the atmosphere than the Amazon rain forests.  This is a sobering message, and one hopes that people will come to understand the seriousness of the situation and start changing purchasing decisions away from products which use krill or krill oil.

One can but hope that matters will improve.  Indeed, the way the Antarctic has been internationally recognised as an important part of the planet is evidenced by the international Antarctic treaty, originally signed up to by 12 member countries and now involving some 27, either as claiming some territorial rights or wishing to enter the area for research purposes.  The conditions of the treaty lay down strict rules about what may and may not be done in the region. It’s heartening to know that countries, even ones which traditionally compete such as USA and Russia, can work together for some kind of common good.  As we head for South Georgia, leave the Antarctic and cross the 60th parallel heading north, I feel better educated about the critical importance of this region, with even a glimmer of hope that the human race might not, for once, fuck something up.

 

 

* Not too seriously, thank goodness.  However, my wife will repair herself, but the camera, whilst still capable of taking pictures, is going to need a visit to a service centre.