22nd Feb
Up before sunrise again for our landing this morning at Whalers bay on Deception Island in the South shetlands.
We’d passed through ‘Neptunes bellows’ whilst
it was still dark to enter the enclosed bay within the volcanic cone that
formed Deception island. Zodiacs took us to the shore and we walked up to a
small vantage point (Neptunes Window) to watch sunrise. Walking back to the
beach, we then walked along it, past fur seals, to an old whaling station previously manned by British and Norwegian
whalers. We had time to explore the remaining huts and huge
whale oil containers. A lot of the buildings had been destroyed by a mudslide as a result of volcanic activity that eventually lead to closure of the whaling station. Finally we watched as a few mad souls ran
in and out of the freezing Antarctic waters from the beach. We were told that
on occasion the waters are actually warm from volcanic activity but that certainly was
not the case today!
From Deception Island we exited the narrow and potentially dangerous channel of 'neptunes bellows' (there is apparently a hidden rock in the certre of the channel that need to be avoided) and made our way slightly further north to Livingston Island where we had our final landing in Antarctic waters at Hannah point on Walkers bay. Here we saw both chinstrap and gentoo penguins, fur and the very ugly and blubbery elephants seals. There were also plently of skuas and albatross nesting and flying around the island as well. We may have left Antarctica proper but we were still seeing new species on this our final landing.
By midday the captain had set course to leave the South shetlands and we made our way towards the Drake passage for our return trip. We had a few more whale sightings, to round the trip off, one quite close to the boat but they very quickly left us so still unsure about their identity, possibly minke whales, generally the sightings were more distant now.
Definitely sad to be leaving Antarctica, very tired and needing time to reflect on all that we'd seen.
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