Deception Island, Antarctica
Antarctica revealed some of its many charms to us today as we visited 3 different parts of this sometimes forbidding island. The wildlife, the wildness, and the “wow this is fun” of this snowy paradise were all in evidence. We awoke this morning to find the volcanic cliffs of Bailey Head looming over the ship and soon we were landing on a black beach alive with chinstrap penguins and boisterous surf. The walk inland revealed an ampitheatre filled with tens of thousands of raucous chinstraps, most of whom who engaged in the loud process of mating and securing a nesting site. As they moved about the rookery, we enjoyed their mastery of the slopes, sometimes edging downhill in a sideways fashion, like a skilled mountaineer, and other times flopping onto their bellies for a fast toboggan ride in the powdery snow.
During lunch the ship repositioned into Port Foster, the flooded caldera of Deception Island and it is here that we intercepted the wildness of Antarctica. The northern portion of the bay was still covered with fast ice, the surface of the ocean frozen and still fastened onto the shoreline in a gigantic sheet over a metre thick. The Captain managed to slice the ship through this ice and bring us to a stop in a secure position, allowing us to lower the gangway and simply walk off the ship in the middle of the bay. In brilliant sunshine we roamed across the flat pan of ice, photographing the ship and enjoying a rare chance to walk on water.
But all of Port Foster was not frozen, and after the ship backed its way out of the ice, we moved a few kilometres to Whaler’s Bay, the site of an early whaling station and a scientific base. Neither enterprise is still in operation, but that did not concern us because our motive for this visit was to go swimming in the geothermally heated waters along the shore. Steam rose from the shallows as the bravest of us (and there were many!) stripped off our parkas and splashed about along the beach. With the sun still shining, it was a fun way to end a spectacular day in northern Antarctica.
