Paulet Island/Brown Bluff 2/2 Monday Day 15
On Monday we visited Paulet Island where we saw and smelled the stinkiest Adelie Penguin colony in the entire Antarctic area. Good lord! If you want pristine white snow and mating Adelies, come in October. If you want baby Adelie chicks, come in December. But if you want super stink that permeates your clothing, and you want to smell it in your cabin the next day, definitely come in February, when the chicks are molting and poop has soaked the snow and turned it pink. Their diet is strictly krill, hence the pink colored poop. Not sure it smelled that bad when they ate it. The penguins only come on land to mate and have chicks, then they spend the rest of their lives at sea, and floating on an occasional iceberg. On the bright side, we also got to see the remains of the Norwegian expedition’s cabin where they spent the winter back in 1902.
We sailed through many very large and very impressive icebergs on our way to Brown Bluff. The weather was beautiful and sunny and around 33 deg F. The water was so clear you could see that roughly 90% of an iceberg’s mass is under the water. We also sailed through a large pod of humpback whales. It was like whale soup. They stopped the boat and shut off the engines and we were surrounded by over a dozen large whales. It was so quiet, and we could see their white fins under the water and hear the loud blows. They certainly are majestic and beautiful. It’s hard to imagine killing them for their blubber. It’s also really hard to get a good photo of their tails. I ended up with a lot of photos of where whale tails used to be.
In the afternoon we made another continental landing at Brown Bluff on the Antarctic peninsula. Brown Buff was formed by a sub-glacial volcano, as is much of the peninsular area. There are about 20,000 pairs of Adelie penguins here, as well as 550 pairs of Gentoo Penguins at Brown Bluff, several varieties of petrels and birds, and some Weddle seals. Brown Bluff is also the home of a very large glacier. We hiked to the edge of the glacier for some great photos. Steve tried to fall into a hole that was not a hole when he stepped into it, but that he later tried to claim was a crevasse. It was just some snow. We were not actually hiking on the actual glacier. 😊
Steve, along with quite a few others, also participated in the polar plunge. On the Plancius, they don’t do the polar plunge by jumping off the ship, as some ships do. Instead, you walk into the water from the shore. The guides claimed that you haven’t really done a polar plunge unless your head is under the water, so he made sure to do it right! He said the water was super cold, but that he wasn’t as cold as he thought he would be when he got out. He did get a priority Zodiac ride back to ship afterwards.
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