Our day began with beautiful clear skies and calm seas in front of Paulet Island in the northern Weddell Sea. The morning excursion ashore featured visits with the penguin ancestors of those breeding pairs who occupied the island in 1901-02, when Captain Larsen and members of the good ship Antarctic were forced to over winter there in a crude stone hut. In the afternoon we had planned to visit Snow Hill Island, where members of the Swedish Antarctic Expedition, also from the Antarctic, spent their winter. Two things happened on our way there, however, and in true Expedition fashion we quickly devised alternate plans.
First we encountered a tabular ice berg whose dimensions were difficult to comprehend from any one angle. We had to travel around it and as we made our way we measured several sides with our radar and determined its total area as one hundred square miles! Rounding one corner we next perceived a brooding bank of fog ahead, between us and Snow Hill Island. Astutely our expedition leader, Matt Drennan, formulated plan B and decided we would stay in the sun, near our floating island of ice, and offer sight-seeing cruises aboard our Zodiacs.
It quickly became apparent that a large amount of wildlife also favored plan B. Minke and humpback whales were busy feeding in the diatom and krill rich waters and we delayed the start of our Zodiac tours to watch them from the platform of the Endeavour. Soon we had our full complement of guests in the Zodiacs and began touring the many smaller ice bergs and bergy bits that dotted the waters. Antarctic fur seals were abundant as were Arctic and Antarctic terns, snow petrels and the occasional giant petrel. Crabeater seals occupied some floes but most impressive were the several leopard seals, one of them pictured here, that were lounging on the ice. Leopard seals are notorious for hanging around penguin colonies and ambushing the birds just offshore as they return from the ocean to their nests. This seal is built for the job with its massive head and powerful jaws, and eleven feet of lithe, muscular body. Just resting here, it showed some interest in us but remained unperturbed as several Zodiacs took turns observing it from a respectful distance. The abundance of life around the giant block of floating ice (not the one in the picture, by the way), impressed us all and made a perfect ending to an already perfect day.
