Brouhaha with Andy

The Return Home Watch as our hero braves the horrors of economy class, struggles to meet luggage weight limits, does battle with Customs and Immigration Agents, before despairing over identifying the correct Uber driver for the final miles Or...perhaps a little less dramatic!  Saturday afternoon, around the time I was thinking about dinner, I happened to look towards the pier and saw Sea Spirit sailing back down the Beagle Channel on her next voyage; a small ship again going out on a very large ocean. I believe this trip is to visit the Antarctica Peninsula a bit further south than we managed, to cross the Antarctic Circle. I hope the crew and guides enjoy their new charges as much as they seemed to enjoy having us onboard, and I hope the new passengers enjoy and get as much from their trip as we did. Sunday I met up for breakfast with a friend from the Sea Spirit who was spending a few weeks in Patagonia before returning to Germany. We chatted, ate, had some coffee, and then she n...

We pulled into port bright and early this morning - dressed, turned luggage over to the crew, had breakfast, and then waited to be bussed to the luggage storage area, where our bags were interned until we returned to pick them up (before 5:30 PM!). After that, I looked for Javier, a vendor selling hand-carved figures near the port and caught up with him (buying a few figures), went to a bookstore to try (unsuccessfully) to find a book about penguins recommended by our ornithologist Ken, had some lunch, ran into a number of now-former shipmates, and talked with another until it was time to leave for the airport and then walked back to my hotel where I watched Sea Spirit get underway and enter the Beagle Channel outbound; since then I've been listening to wistful and melancholy music as I send and reply to emails and messages from the folks I've shared the ship with for the last three weeks. I've also been repacking my luggage and pulling out a few more things to leave behind...

 So we arrived in the Beagle Channel and we are awaiting our scheduled time to pull into the pier. We were steaming for much of the day, and are still steaming, albeit at a very slow speed; just enough to control the ship (called "steerage way"). We should tie up tomorrow around 7 AM, then I'm off to the luggage storage building to pick up my luggage to drag to the hotel for the night - my flight to Buenos Aires takes off the following day around 2 PM. And I've got to admit I've lost track of what day today is. And I see on the calendar - since I'm writing after midnight it's now Saturday.  It was a busy day today, with stuff that had to get done, but was time-consuming - like turning in our boots. Wait in line, wait a little more, keep waiting, then a line through my name, a quick look for penguin poo, and OK to go. Then the next thing and the next - lectures, disembarkation briefing, paying off our room charges, tips for the staff who helped us the most,...

 Short entry today - more (hopefully) tomorrow. We set out from Antarctica yesterday evening and were beyond the South Orkney Islands and into the Southern Ocean by the time I went to sleep. We've been steaming all day at about 12-15 knots and are now about halfway between the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and the tip of South America. We should enter the mouth of the Beagle Channel by bedtime tomorrow and will then make our leisurely way to Ushuaia, to arrive at the ship's scheduled docking time. Once we're docked we'll be hustled off the ship and bussed to the airport (for those with flights the same day or to the Poseidon luggage storage facility (for those, like me, who are staying overnight or longer). It's hard to believe the trip is nearly over. Today was much like one of the last days of high school, except that, instead of signing yearbooks (is that still done?) we're exchanging email/phone/WhatsApp/WeChat information. One person I talked with when sta...

 A bittersweet day today. On the one hand, I saw two whales breaching from a distance today and was able to take a nice photo of a whale's tail during a deep dive at close range. On the negative side, I had my last walk in Antarctica and my last Zodiac cruise in Antarctic bays for...who knows how long. We are now on our way back to Ushuaia at 14 knots; we are still in Antarctic waters, but only for a few hours more. We have the Drake Passage ahead of us, but that's only a few days - we should arrive in Ushuaia in the early morning of January 25 and I should be back in my apartment in Bay Ridge in the morning of Jan 27. That's all for now (well, a few photos too!) - it's been a tiring few days and it's after midnight; time for me to get some sleep. I'll spend tomorrow organizing my photos, packing my things, and giving a short talk to the guides and passengers about natural radiation and the dose we've all picked up on this trip (spoiler: less than if we'...

Picture yourself sitting about a foot above calm water in a ridiculously beautiful bay filled with icebergs, "bergy bits," and brash ice and surrounded by mountains of ice and rock. Sun shining, breeze not blowing and, when the motor of the Zodiac is turned off, utterly silent except for the calls of the penguins on the shore and nearby islands. The only other sound is the water, gently lapping the Zodiac's hull, and then you hear a sudden outrush of air. Turning towards the sound you see, emerging gently from the water about 50 yards away, the topmost part of a head as long as your Zodiac, above which you see some residual steam hanging in the air in the shape of a plume. Part of a massive back emerges from the water as well with a fin in about the middle. Perhaps you hear another breath, see another plume of steam, and then the back arches into an impossibly tight bend and the head and back sink beneath the waves. You're lucky today and, as the arch rises into the a...

  I'm not sure if it's possible to have a perfect day - it seems there's always a fly in the ointment. But today was a pretty good day and whatever imperfections there might have been are so minor in comparison to the good as to not even warrant mention. With animals alone we saw gentoo and chinstrap penguins; leopard, crabeater, and Weddell seals; and at least a dozen kinds of birds. And, at the end of the day, we saw whales as the ship ended up close to a small group of three or four humpbacks and about a half mile from another small group of a similar size. Close enough to hear the sound of the blows, to see the back fin, and to see the tails of several as they dived - all in front of a magnificent backdrop of mountains lit golden by the setting sun. And that's just the animals - today we also had our first steps on the Antarctic continent, we spent several hours walking with penguins and riding a Zodiac in an area of incomparable beauty on what, back home, would be ...

 If you search for Penguin Island in Google Maps you're going to be shown an island in Australia. That's where it took me, at least. So look for King George Island, Antarctica and click to show the Satellite View, skootch a little to the right, and you should see it come on-screen. It's not a large island - we saw quite a bit of it in just two hours on foot - but there are fur seals, elephant seals, and scads of Chinstrap penguins (there are often Adelie penguins earlier in the summer, but apparently they've left now for chillier climes).  Looking at Penguin Island from the sea (well, actually from the Bransfield Strait running between the Southern Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula) and you'll see a small, dark island silhouetted against the bright glaciers on King George Island, a gray cinder cone from a (I think) extinct volcano, and a few patches of green and orange. It's not an inviting-looking place, but the penguins and seals (and not much else)...

  Another fun (for me anyhow) day at sea in somewhat heavy seas. According to the weather report we've had winds at about 25 knots or so with gusts in excess of 60 knots; the swell is making the ship go up and down several times each minute, which is causing a lot of the passengers to stick to their beds all day. It's also impressive to be in the bridge, seeing the horizon recede as a 6-meter swell lifts us up, then watching the horizon close in again as we drop down between the crests.. The wind, of course, tears the tops off of the swell and the waves, spraying the bow and most of one side of the ship, as well as anyone who happens to be walking on that side. It's also whipping the snow down the side of the ship - which is why I've been happy to remain indoors the entire day. And I've actually been pretty productive - I finished some writing I've been working on, emailed a bunch of photos to various and sundry folks, and went through all the photos I've ta...

 We've been in reasonably heavy seas since leaving South Georgia Island yesterday afternoon; today we've had swells 3-4 meters high all day and the ship has been rolling side-to-side as well as rocking forward-to-aft at angles of about 5-10 degrees. Many of the passengers (and even some of the crew) have been seasick much of the day and the dining room has been noticeably under-utilized. Having said that, the ship has stabilizers and the seas are less than what we saw in the North Pacific in winter - and the rolls are much less than the 25-35 degrees we experienced. I'm able to walk without falling and I've only once lurched into a stranger; having said that, I'm usually not walking a straight line as the rolls are irregular due to seas seemingly coming from multiple directions - most of the time it's a relatively stable roll, but every now and again the ship lurches at about 10 degrees or so and even the ship's crew are reaching for the handrails. But I...

As I write this we've left South Georgia Island behind and are on our way to Antarctica, expected to arrive (weather permitting) after about 2 1/2 days at sea. But even though we started our transit just after lunch, we had a full day - and a good day, albeit with both good and some bad.  We were woken up at 5:50 this morning, giving me about 4 hours of sleep. The reason for the early wakeup was to visit Hercules Bay to give us a chance to see the Macaroni penguins, then to move to Stromness (a former Norwegian whaling station and the place at which Shackleton ended up and finally found help to rescue his men) and Leith Harbor before heading south and west. Hercules Bay was wonderful! It's a small bay with fantastic rock formations and lots of penguins and seals scattered throughout. The colonies are scattered and largely without landing spots so we did a Zodiac cruise, but since there are no beaches we could get closer to everything than if we'd made a landing. So we saw s...

 Long day today and I'm trying not to fall asleep as I write this, if only to improve readability. But it will be a short entry, to which I'll add photos tomorrow or the next day (along with a few other entries. I should mention that, due to bandwidth issues, it's taking me from 5-20 minutes to upload a single graphic, which is why I haven't been including many. Anyhow.... We started the day in Grytviken, the former "capital" of South Georgia Island and the hub of the whaling industry here. That was all shut down and the island was abandoned with the exception of a scientific research station plus three women running the museum gift shop and the post office/gift shop.  The former plants used to process whales for their oil, meat, and whalebone are rusting, left as they were when the town and island were abandoned. The "owners" now are the seals, penguins, and birds, and it seems somehow appropriate to see the animals wandering amidst the tanks, wharv...

  This afternoon we were taking a Zodiac tour of Gold Harbor, on the north side of South Georgia Island. The weather was beautiful - sunny (I got a bit of sunburn on my face), and the temperature was so warm that in the morning I had dubbed my expedition parka a PPS - Poseidon Portable Sauna. This afternoon was a little cooler and we noticed the swell more because we spent over an hour in a Zodiac, tooling around the harbor watching (and photographing, of course) penguins (King and Gentoo), elephant seals, birds, sea lions, and fur seals - as well as the incredible scenery. And tehn someone in the Zodiac asked the guide "Is that a leopard seal?" The leopard seal is one of the ocean's predators and they dine on, among other things, penguins - and we were just a few hundred yards away from over 100,000 King and Gentoo penguins and chicks. For a leopard seal it was an all-you-can-eat penguin buffet. The guide said told us that leopard seals were uncommon around South Georgia...