Thursday, January 25
Thursday morning dawned cloudy, but the overcast soon gave way to scattered clouds and sunlight as we approached Neptune's Bellows, the entrance to Whaler's Bay in the interior of Deception Island. Another expedition ship could be seen laying off to the east of the island. The island was mostly free of snow and ice. There were hints of green grass or mosses and lichens on many of its slopes. The air temperature was nearly forty degrees F. and the wind was blowing about forty miles per hour.
The volcanic rocks making up the cliffs on either side of Neptune's Bellows are colored bright red and yellow. The cliffs harbor a large population of Cape Petrels and Kelp Gulls.
Flocks of birds were resting on the water in and around the entrance to the bay. It sounded like the soundtrack to Hitchcock's "The Birds". White guano stained the upper surfaces of all the rocks.
Once inside the bay, the ship steered toward a cluster of deteriorating buildings on the shore. Through binoculars, I could see that steam was rising from a large lake and from parts of the black sand beach. Antarctic Fur Seals were lounging on the shore. Some of the young males were engaging in discussions of territory issues.
A stiff breeze was blowing as we observed the old whaling station and British Antarctic Expedition outpost. The outpost had been abandoned during the last eruptions in 1969. The largest building was the old airplane hangar. It was constructed of metal and had weathered the years fairly well. Other wooden structures of the outpost were in various states of decomposition.
The tanks of the whale blubber rendering plant were surrounded by the remains of collapsed wooden buildings. Large, rusting whale oil storage tanks sat on the shore. One of them had been tipped part way over by floods of glacial melt water during the eruptions. We were told that at least one of the tanks had been washed all the way into the bay.
The ship's staff had dug a hole in the sand of the beach. Water collected in the hole. Geothermal heat quickly made the water warm enough for people to soak in.
Part of the wall of the caldera has collapsed, leaving a low point called Neptune's Window. Debbie and I turned toward Neptune's Window and hiked up the beach. A cloudy overcast blew into the interior of the island.
Very soon we came across whale bones eroding out of the volcanic ash. A short distance away we saw a large pile of what appeared to be more whale bones. On closer examination they turned out to be old whale oil barrels. The pile of barrels had been buried during volcanic eruptions. Now the barrels are eroding out of the ash again.
The rotting hulks of small wooden boats were scattered along the beach. They had been water boats. They were used to take loads of ice and snow to the whaling ships offshore to be melted for fresh water. Erosion of the volcanic ash had exposed several small wooden buildings. Some of them were relatively intact. The walls of some of the buildings had collapsed, leaving the roofs lying on piles of broken timbers.
A solitary Weddell Seal was basking on the beach, where it was warmed by the geothermal heat. It stretched sleepily to scratch its tail flipper with a pectoral fin.
Farther down the beach, a group of Antarctic Fur Seals were lying about. Occasionally, a pair of males would engage in some roughhousing, but mostly they just slept peacefully.
We followed a trail up to Neptune's Window. The low point in the caldera rim provided a view of a cove on the outer shore of the island. Cape Petrels were nesting in the crags of the cliff faces. A strong wind blew in through the window from the open sea beyond. The petrels rode the lift from the wind rising to the window to reach their nesting area. When they turned to face the incoming wind, they stopped beating their wings and glided on the turbulent currents. The turbulence required them to make many small, rapid adjustments of their wings and tail to maintain their position next to the cliff face.
Dad had arrived at the window a little while before me. After chatting for a bit, he started down the trail and hiked along the beach to the British outpost in the distance. Just after he headed down, I spotted Debbie hiking up by a different route. We observed the petrels for a while longer and then followed the trail that Dad had taken down to the beach.
Fur seals were resting among a pile of old whale oil barrels. One of them was curled up inside the remains of a partially collapsed barrel. It paid scant attention to me as I took its picture, but a male seal that had been napping nearby lifted its head and began huffing its indignation at me for disturbing its rest.
Debbie and I hiked back toward the Zodiac landing. A cold, misty wind was blowing down from the glaciers on the rim of the caldera, which resulted in copious quantities of steam rising from the warm sand of the beach.
We had about twenty minutes left to explore when we reached the landing, so we hiked on toward the whale rendering plant and the airplane hangar. We did not have time to get all the way to the hangar, but we saw a lone figure walking toward us from the decrepit building. It was Dad, returning from the far side of the outpost. He had found an old, single-engine airplane fuselage sitting out of site on the other side of the hangar. I had missed my only chance to take a picture of an airplane in Antarctica.
People were no longer soaking in the puddle on the shore. The water temperature in the hole had risen to 140 degrees F., far too hot to get in.
I shot a portrait of a lone Gentoo Penguin standing on the shore with the Hanseatic floating in the distance. Then we boarded the Zodiac and returned to the ship. We sailed back out through Neptune's Bellows, steered a course to the northeast, and headed for Livingstone Island, about forty miles away.
The sun came out every once in a while as we cruised to Livingstone Island, but most of the time it was overcast. I put on extra layers of clothes and my hooded parka and went up to the observation deck.
Glaciers cover most of Livingstone Island. Only the headlands near the shore are free of ice. The part of the island that we could see was composed largely of dark, old metamorphic rocks from the Paleozoic Era.
The sea was flat with a light chop as we cruised toward the island. I had been sitting in a deck chair, shielded from the wind by the metal barrier at the front of the observation deck for over an hour, dozing off part of the time, when I spotted a whale spout about a mile off the port bow. Within a few moments more whales spouted in the same area. It was a pod of about a half-dozen Humpback Whales. The pod passed about a quarter of a mile to the port side of the ship. They would stay submerged for the better part of a minute, then they would surface and we would see a dozen spouts in as many seconds. We could clearly see their dorsal fins. Several times we saw the flukes of the whales as they sounded.
The force of the wind increased as we got closer to the island. A very cold wind was blowing down from the glacier in front of us. The wind speed was about fifty miles per hour, producing a severe wind chill.
Southern Giant Petrels seemed to relish the high wind. They glided in front of the Hanseatic, turning left and right to stay in the region of lift produced by the wind rising over the ship.
The ship sailed close by Hannah Point, a low, rocky headland, and dropped anchor in the bay. Large chunks of ice littered the shore of the bay.
I was placed at the front of the Zodiac for the ride to shore. I recognized our Zodiac driver as Sandy, the girl who waited on our usual table in the Marco Polo Restaurant. She was being evaluated for her Zodiac rating.
The wind was still blowing hard, kicking up some chop and tearing spray off the tops of the waves as we rode to the shore. Every so often, the bow of the Zodiac would smack into a wave and splash a generous quantity of 33 degree F. water up over the bow and into my face. A shoal of ice chunks, each piece a few feet across, had accumulated in the groin of the point near the Zodiac landing.
Sandy turned the Zodiac toward the point as she left the shore after dropping us off. That put the Zodiac in shallow water where the propeller was striking the rocks on the bottom. The current was carrying the Zodiac toward the point, and Sandy had some trouble getting the boat back into deeper water. We could hear the propellers taking a serious beating on the rocks until she got the Zodiac headed back out into the bay.
Both Gentoo Penguins and Chinstrap Penguins rook at Hannah Point. Their colonies are right next to each other, but they do not mix with each other very much. The Chinstrap Penguin rookery was much messier than the Gentoo Penguin rookery. The Gentoo Penguin chicks had less guano embedded in their down.
Feeding chases were happening all over the rookeries. Pairs of fat, gray, down-covered chicks were chasing slender black and white adults in order to get their ration of krill. The chicks were fatter than the adult penguins, and they were nearly as tall.
White Sheathbills strutted among the penguins, looking for fresh guano to dine upon. Near the top of the rookery a gray and white, adult Kelp Gull was nesting with a spotted gray fledgling. A drop of salt water from the salt excreting organ near the fledgling's nostrils was hanging from the tip of its beak.
A short hike brought me to the top of the cliff overlooking the other side of the point. Southern Elephant Seals were basking on the rocky shore below. Most of them were adult females. There were a few juveniles of both sexes as well. One of the adult females wallowed across the rocks and into the water. People often compare the motion to a big slug, but to me it looks more like a big, fat, fast-moving inchworm.
Penguins entered the water in small groups. They waddled a short distance into the water and flopped onto their bellies. They paddled for a short distance, looking around for Leopard Seals, before ducking their heads under the water and swimming off. They accelerated remarkably fast once they were flying submerged. They left sharp, v-shaped wakes in the water behind them as they porpoised along.
We rode a Zodiac to another landing on the far side of the bay. This time I made sure that the hood of my parka was not caught in my lifejacket and camera bag strap, so I could protect myself better from the cold spray.
We landed on a broad beach of black sand. The high tide line was dotted with strangely sculpted pieces of ice that were coated with a thick layer of the black sand.
We were directed to a group of Southern Elephant Seals lying a short distance down the beach. There were a couple of extremely large males lying amongst the smaller, yet still very big, females. Male Southern Elephant Seals do not have the trunk-like proboscis of the Northern Elephant Seal. They slept quietly for the most part. Once in a while one of them would scratch an itch with its pectoral fin.
A trio of juvenile seals was lying on the cobbles above the beach. They were lighter in color than the adult seals.
The beach was obstructed by a moraine, composed of unsorted, angular stones deposited at the end of a glacier. The glacier had retreated up the slope several hundred feet since the moraine had been deposited. Smaller moraines marked places where the rate of retreat had slowed, so that the position of the foot of the glacier had been fairly stable for a period long enough to dump a load of rocks.
We crossed a stream of glacial melt water, milky with finely ground sediment, and patches of green moss to get to the base of the hills above the beach. Joann Stock of Caltech was standing near some large boulders that had tumbled from the slopes above. She explained the volcanic origin of the boulders and pointed out some of the interesting inclusions in them. It appeared that the hill above us was built of a lava flow that was overlain by pyroclastic flows of volcanic ash. The volcanic eruptions probably dated back to the Paleozoic Era. When it was evident that no other passengers were going to walk over to see the geology, Joann climbed farther up the slope to examine the exposures of bedrock.
A large collection of interesting stones had been placed on one of the boulders. It was evident that the display had been accumulating for many years. The rocks included large pieces of petrified wood and shale bearing the imprint of fern fossils. A variety of bones had been assembled on another boulder nearby. The jaw and teeth of a Leopard Seal were clearly recognizable. There were bits of whale bone as well as bones of other pinnipeds.
The surfaces of the boulders had acquired a woolly growth of lichens and mosses. Some of the lichens grew several inches long.
It was getting late in the afternoon and almost all of the other passengers had returned to the Hanseatic already. We walked back down to the Zodiac landing to wait for the next boat. A solitary Gentoo Penguin patrolled the shore near the landing.
When the Zodiac arrived it was apparent that everyone left on shore would fit aboard, so we all piled into the last boat to return to the Hanseatic from our last landing in Antarctica.
The ship weighed anchor that evening and steered a course around Livingstone Island to reach the Drake Passage.