St.Andrews Bay & Ocean Harbour
A quiet night at anchor was a rare treat... but our shore landing this morning was rarer. Stepping out onto a black gravel beach, we were met by a throng of cheering natives: resplendent King Penguins. They seemed almost as excited as we were: welcoming flotillas swam along the shoreline to meet us, small groups paced regally towards our landing site to pay their respects, while fur seal pups ran to and fro to add to the generally festive air. This is a penguin beach at the height of the austral summer: penguins swimming, courting, promenading, canoeing down the glacial river behind the beach crest, or standing around on the banks, bathing, basking and bodysurfing. But our landing site was merely the sports area. Exploring the main beach freeway, we moved through a swirling ballroom of courting couples. Kings paid court to admiring queens, while some jealous rivals started brief disputes marked by the clatter of angry flippers. From the shoulder of a glacial moraine we looked out over the most stunning sight of all: the Kingdom’s capital city. In one breathtaking vista were over 100,000 birds packed into a kaleidoscopic kindergarten, their murmurings and buglings like a revving swarm of bees. This is one of the oldest spectacles on the planet, for penguins have been around for 40million years, and nowhere is there a denser throng, nor a grander setting, than the eastern shores of South Georgia. Tom led a more daring hike into the hinterland, encountering a herd of 50 reindeer en route and venturing onto the face of the glacier, which has retreated almost a mile inland in the last 20 years.
In the afternoon we found a sheltered anchorage at Ocean Harbour and came in past the rusting hulk of a stranded 3-masted barque. Mike led a group of keen hikers up a spectacular valley behind the bay and into encircling ice-carved mountains, where cloud and sun created a wonderful lightshow. At the head of the bay had been a Norwegian whaling station from 1909 to 1920; rusting remains of a miniature locomotive, old boilers and flywheels were stark reminders of a once industrial landscape. Whalers’ gravestones, and the bones of huge whales embedded in the shoreline peat beds were also memorials to the slaughter of a lost century. But time is healing this damage, for where chains once clanked and smoke belched from chimneys, there was nothing in this bright, peaceful afternoon sunshine but the carefree romp and scuffle of young fur seals gambolling in the surf and shoreline pools.
A quiet night at anchor was a rare treat... but our shore landing this morning was rarer. Stepping out onto a black gravel beach, we were met by a throng of cheering natives: resplendent King Penguins. They seemed almost as excited as we were: welcoming flotillas swam along the shoreline to meet us, small groups paced regally towards our landing site to pay their respects, while fur seal pups ran to and fro to add to the generally festive air. This is a penguin beach at the height of the austral summer: penguins swimming, courting, promenading, canoeing down the glacial river behind the beach crest, or standing around on the banks, bathing, basking and bodysurfing. But our landing site was merely the sports area. Exploring the main beach freeway, we moved through a swirling ballroom of courting couples. Kings paid court to admiring queens, while some jealous rivals started brief disputes marked by the clatter of angry flippers. From the shoulder of a glacial moraine we looked out over the most stunning sight of all: the Kingdom’s capital city. In one breathtaking vista were over 100,000 birds packed into a kaleidoscopic kindergarten, their murmurings and buglings like a revving swarm of bees. This is one of the oldest spectacles on the planet, for penguins have been around for 40million years, and nowhere is there a denser throng, nor a grander setting, than the eastern shores of South Georgia. Tom led a more daring hike into the hinterland, encountering a herd of 50 reindeer en route and venturing onto the face of the glacier, which has retreated almost a mile inland in the last 20 years.
In the afternoon we found a sheltered anchorage at Ocean Harbour and came in past the rusting hulk of a stranded 3-masted barque. Mike led a group of keen hikers up a spectacular valley behind the bay and into encircling ice-carved mountains, where cloud and sun created a wonderful lightshow. At the head of the bay had been a Norwegian whaling station from 1909 to 1920; rusting remains of a miniature locomotive, old boilers and flywheels were stark reminders of a once industrial landscape. Whalers’ gravestones, and the bones of huge whales embedded in the shoreline peat beds were also memorials to the slaughter of a lost century. But time is healing this damage, for where chains once clanked and smoke belched from chimneys, there was nothing in this bright, peaceful afternoon sunshine but the carefree romp and scuffle of young fur seals gambolling in the surf and shoreline pools.
