Antarctic Sound

Tuesday night we left Deception Island and headed towards the Antarctic Sound and the Weddell Sea.

We awoke yesterday to being a very low cloud cover, but some decent visibility underneath it.

There were 4 potential landing sites that our expedition staff had hoped to go to; however, they were all full of ice and inaccessible. So we went on a zodiac cruise instead. We launched and came across an Antarctic Fur Seal hauled out on the ice.

They are quite the recovery story. They were hunted almost to extinction for their furs, down to a few hundred. Now they number over 5 million and are the most numerous seal species in the world.

From there we jammed our zodiac up onto an ice flow, and went for a little walk.

It was really cold out, with a temperature of -8°C with 15 knot winds. During our little ice walk the weather turned, snow started blowing in, and visibility died.

We still had a bit of cruse time left, and had seen a seal further away, so went to investigate with another zodiac. It was a leopard seal pulled out onto an ice flow.

We got back onboard the boat and began our trek back to the north. On the way we passed a large tabular iceberg. Between what we saw and what the bridge crew saw on radar it was about 800m wide by 1500m long.

From there it was steaming north back into the South Shetland Islands, trying to keep the bulk of winds and waves to our stern (making the ride as comfortable as possible). However what is waiting for us in the north side of the Drake Passage doesn’t look too inviting.