Packing Is Going To Be Tricky...
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 9 ~ January 22 ~ Antarctica (Palaver Point)
It's another sunny Antarctic day, and our last before we start heading back North, across the Drake Passage to Ushuaia in Argentina. The wind has picked up a little (we've been told to pack securely) but the conditions are still good enough for the Zodiacs. The group rotation has put us in the last Zodiac out today and we're told that we've been lucky: the sea has calmed a fair bit since the first group went.
We're visiting Palaver Point on the west side of Two Hummock Island. The name of the point comes from the noise of the penguin rookery here: “What a palaver!”
As always, we have to stick to a single path.
Chinstraps, with some quite large chicks now.
Come on, you can never have too many penguin pictures!
They aren't quite songbirds, it must be admitted, but they make plenty of noise.
And they're particularly cute sliding on their tummies.
It's so warm I'm down to just my base layer; I'm pretty sure it's a lot colder back in London now.
The Zodiacs come to take us back.
Bye bye...
Oh all right, just one more penguin.
Back on the ship, we all gather on the foredeck for a group photo. Hard to see at this scale, but Amanda and I are towards the back on the far left. Yun is using a 14mm lens, which is a really wide angle, but it's still a struggle to get everyone in from her vantage point.
And now the expedition team pose for their own group photo.
But who's taking it? Yun (in the yellow beanie raising her hands) is the official expedition photographer as I said, but obviously she can't take the picture and be in it too, so she's handed me her camera and asked me to do the honours.
My pleasure. A finer bunch we couldn't have asked for, they've all been brilliant.
It's a touch brisk even with the sun, but Amanda has brought her cossie and she's going to have a little dip in the hot tub and then a swim in the pool just so she can say she's done it.
It's not quite Olympic standard, and the aforementioned Icon of the Seas has no fewer than seven pools, including “the first suspended infinity pool at sea” of all things, but just remember, they don't have penguins!
On a completely different note, instead of a final excursion as the sea starts to swell a little, we are given a short tour of the bridge in groups of a dozen or so. But the ship is starting to move about a bit now, and Amanda is starting to feel a touch queasy, so I go on my own.
This is a key navigational tool, the windy.com website. Our route is going to be roughly along the line where the reddish and lilac areas meet, the former colour meaning roughly 4-5m waves, the latter more like 3m. This is fairly typical we understand, but the captain has decided to depart a little earlier than originally expected to get the best conditions.
The basic service is free, so you can try it yourself: Drake Passage area wind and waves. As I write this, the whole area is red, so slightly bigger waves than we have here.
Drinks and canapés at the evening briefing. They tell us that we will start to hit open water after dinner and we should “Drake-proof” our cabins by making sure that all loose items are secured. Amanda isn't sure that dinner is going to be her best idea, but we'll see.
Very mild really, but still heavier seas than we had around the peninsula.
It's clear the crew are preparing for a bit more.
After dinner, Amanda takes a Kwell tablet and ginger lozenge before bed in the hope that they will help.
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