Last Day in Antarctica
Not last day on the ship though. From 10 full days on the ship we will in the end have spent 5 in the Drake Passage, flipping around. Antarctica is far away and you have to make efforts, and from my point of view it can stay like this always.
Today in the morning we visited Penguin Island and had quite an exciting time there. Before reaching the island, the weather was fantastic, we had blue skies for the first time as we got closest to another huge tabular iceberg. Perfect brochure photos. I tried to explain the guests that this may change very quickly and gave the example of the group of many pax of a cruise vessel not too many years ago who had to overnight and spend 12 hours on the island as the wind picked up that much they could not be transferred back to their vessel. Since this incident ships carry emergency equipment to some landing sites. So did we…
We split in 2 groups, the hikers went up to a top and looked into the reddish crater. I stayed in the lower area watching the many fur seals and southern giant petrels. To make it short about what happened is that we had to wait 50 minutes on the beach for the zodiacs to pick us up and did quite some body exercise in order to make ourselves visible to the officer on watch, after the radio battery went flat. No danger, no freezing, but our own Antarctic Expedition story now ;).
In the afternoon we visited Arctowski station (Poland) and I was very happy about that announcement, as this was kind of my Antarctic living room, have been there so many times. And it was very nice as always! We were offered “Captain´s Coffee”, cookies and Salzstangen, while their chef prepaired the dinner table (we had our own BBQ on board this night), then we were shown around the station area outside, before our drivers did a great job in picking us up again as the wind had picked up.
This was our last day in Antarctica, we will be entering the Beagle Channel and be close to Cape Hoorn on the third day from now. And in 2 hours we will be entering the Drake Passage so after a great dinner with lots of laughs about whats to come now, I will close down and try to be deep asleep when the drama part II starts to happen again ;).
