Lemaire Channel & Grandidier Channel
While travelling only a few dozen miles today, we experienced great contrasts in the seas through which we glided. At the start of the day, we etched a course through the reflectively placid waters of the Lemaire Channel, a double-ended fiord that marks the boundary between the relatively civilised waters to the north, and the ice-strewn passages that stretch down toward Antarctica’s frigid interior.
This fiord cleaves a path between high peaks on both sides and our Video Chronicler patrolled in a lone Zodiac to document our passage. This brought us to our destination for the morning: Booth Island. Here we managed to combine kayaking in the sheltered waters with hiking to penguin colonies on the snowy slopes above. Gentoo, chinstrap, and adelie penguins all breed here, and the historically minded among us enjoyed the few visible remains of a 1904 expedition, led by Jean Baptiste Charcot.
In the afternoon we went south looking for ice and soon found it in the wide Grandidier Channel. Large pans of sea ice clogged the route to the south while we scanned the floes for seals and other wildife.
We weren’t the only ones keeping an eye out for seals – a pod of killer whales was patrolling in front of us, occasionally spy-hopping in an attempt to locate a tasty morsel on an ice floe.
Pushing further south, we encountered increasingly heavy pack ice and by 2130, we’d reached our turn-around point at 65º 45’ S latitude. As the Captain brought the ship around to a northerly heading, we lingered on deck, savouring the lengthening shadows and rosy glow that spread over the icy peaks of the Antarctic Peninsula.
