Traveling with Storys: November 26, 2024 - Tuesday

November 26, 2024 – Tuesday Day 62 of this journey

Explore Antarctica – Day 1 – Fournier Bay

We are still rocking and rolling today, but not as bad as it was at dinner last night. We hope to be at our first stop around 1:00 pm. About 4 hours before that, we will be in a region that has reduced speed of 10Knots.

About 7:30 am, we saw a chunk of ice. A chunk bigger than our ship.

Then, around 9:00 am, we could see mountains on the horizon. White mountains. Huge white mountains. Oh my gosh.

Finally, we were allowed outside, but only on Port side and the Bow. We went out to take a look. The wind is still at 40 knots. And the temperature is at 30 degrees Fahrenheit. I can’t imagine what the wind chill was, but we only lasted a couple of minutes before we were headed back indoors.

I know they call this the “White Continent”, but pictures certainly don’t come anywhere near doing it justice. Our minds aren’t capable of taking it all in.

We reach Fournier Bay which was our goal. The water is like glass. Icebergs float by. Gentoo penguins swim by. Now we realize we are here. The sun is shining, mostly.

For some reason, we were not scheduled for any excursions today, so we talked to Guest Services. They were able to find us a spot on the 5:00 pm Zodiac ride. That necessitated moving our dinner reservation back by an hour and Guest Services took care of that as well.

We show up on Deck A a little too early so find a spot to sit in the corner. Since we’ve got many layers on, we really didn’t want to go back up to the heated area of the ship. Our zodiac arrives and we are loaded. We are with Babz again, which we are very pleased about.

Ice sculpted by water and wind

A small mountain floating by

This is the strangest looking piece of ice.

It is beautiful out. The sun is shining, there is no wind, so no swells. There are some clouds as well, but nothing looks threatening. We started with a small colony of penguins on some rocks with a large Skua (a natural predator of the penguins) hanging out on the rocks with them. The penguins we see here are Gentoo penguins. They are one of the larger penguins in this area. Their super-power (as Babz puts it) is their speed. Most penguins swim underwater at about 8 MPH. The Gentoo can swim underwater at 22 MPH. They can also dive to about 650 feet.

The bird on top of the rock is a Skua, natural predator of penguins

Whales were seen in the area earlier in the day, so we keep our eyes peeled for them. We see a couple of humpbacks just ahead of us and watch for a few minutes until we see them dive. We keep looking at the area where they went down hoping they would return when we hear a WHOOSH from behind us. There they are about 100 feet from our boat. They play around for a bit before diving again. Then we see a couple more in the distance. Then the two we had been watching are up again, when we see two more just a few hundred yards away. Oh my gosh.

We are over our allotted time for this ride, but Babz is done for the day, and the zodiac we are in will be put away when she gets back, so she has been given permission to stay out a little bit more. We stop by an iceberg that has quite a few Gentoos on it. The sun is glittering off the ice. It’s just beautiful.