Today will be our last day of off-ship excursions. Overnight we sailed north across the Bransfield Strait to the South Shetland Islands. The South Shetland Islands stretch almost 350 miles southwest to northeast, with four major groupings of islands and about 150 islands in total. Our destination was Snow Island in the southwestern end of the island chain, near Deception Island. Deception Island is classified as having “significant volcanic risk,” having erupted several times in 1967-1970.
Snow Island is unlike any of the terrain we have seen thus far in Antarctica, offering our first beach landing at President Head. Popular with elephant seals, President Head was also an historic whaling site.
We loaded our zodiac boats at 9:15 am for the short trip to President Head. We could see and hear the elephant seals well before we reached shore. But the first seal that greeted us was a crabeater seal – he seemed to be interested in us:
Then a couple of lone Gentoo penguins wandered past us, and I tried out the video feature on our Canon EOS T7:
We next walked to the other end of the beach where the Elephant seals were congregated. The elephant is the largest seal in the world, partly named for its overall size and partly for the male’s large inflatable proboscis (nose) that looks vaguely like an elephant’s trunk, on an adult male.
Elephant seals gorge themselves at sea so that their blubber reserves sustain them through the breeding season, during which they fast. Bulls constantly fight for dominance, guarding a harem of 25 to 50 cows. The fighting we saw today was relatively tame compared to what takes place in September-December breeding season. The males we saw were also young, more jostling for position rather than engaging in serious fighting.
We returned to the zodiac for the trip back to the Octantis in time for lunch and then treated ourselves to a spa afternoon before the dreaded return Drake Passage.
At the daily briefing, we were given an unfavorable weather report for the Drake Passage, considerably worse than the rough southbound crossing last week. Here’s a screenshot of the wind forecast map for our return. Blue and green are calm winds; red and pink are stormy. The crossing down was mostly in the yellow 30-35 knot wind range (34-40 mph). The return trip looks to include the 40-50 knot range (46-57 mph).
During dinner (sushi again), we sailed through a relatively calm wind-protected area east of the South Shetland Islands, passing Livingston, Greenwich and Robert Islands. Just before 9 pm we turned north past Robert Island, entering the Drake Passage.
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