Antarctic Sound & Brown Bluff
After reaching our furthest south two days ago, we sailed north up the Gerlache Strait during the night. This morning we woke to a misty seascape with vague grey blockhouses along the horizon. With our senses retuned by morning coffee and a welcome breakfast, things started to look different. The seascape sharpened, the mist cleared, bolts of blue rent the dull skies and the grey blockhouses started to flash white and blue. Icebergs!
By now we had reached the Antarctic Strait, a narrow channel which skirts the northernmost tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, a secret passage into the infamous Weddell Sea. In 1903 it trapped and crushed Nordenskjöld’s ship the Antarctic, after which this Strait is named. Twelve years later it crushed Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. Two weeks ago it trapped the veteran Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, releasing it reluctantly after a frightening, frozen fortnight. And this is where we are headed……
Sunlight explodes through portholes. We explode onto the decks. Adelie penguins explode like black tuna to shatter the deep blue mirror of a silent sea. Suddenly we find ourselves in a slowmotion blue dreamscape where giant tabular icebergs sail blindly past on their own juggernaut courses, oblivious to our tiny tincan vessel. We need to jink and weave like some Nordic skier to avoid them. On floating strings of brash ice, comatose crabeater seals sprawl, dreaming of krill. A dappled squadron of pintados skims low over the ultramarine blue surface. Tiny storm-petrels skitter like bats among the ice floes. Now our destination appears to the south: a bronze buttress among the icefields called Brown Bluff.
In no time the Zodiacs ferry us ashore across water so clear the seabed can be seen fifteen fathoms below. From a grey cobble beach we gaze up at the golden cliffs 2,000 feet above us. The rotten battlements of an ancient volcanic castle teeter there; our landing site is decorated with giant wind-sculpted boulders which have fallen from those heights. Best not to think about that as we stroll among the suburbs of a vast Adélie penguin city, whose citizens shout their clattering claims to the blue heavens. Their neighbours bicker, thieve and squabble, but most are stolidly settled now, guarding two precious eggs which will become the heirs to each closely contested piece of real estate: a pile of stones on a frozen hillside, in the shadow of a wind-whittled cliff.
