Through the night National Geographic Explorer continued her southward journey in the fabled Drake Passage towards the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica. This particular Drake crossing has been the most challenging so far of the season as we have left the latitudes of the Furious Fifties behind and are now fully into the Screaming Sixties! The moniker is well deserved as the ship faces gale-force winds and waves approaching 10 meters in height, towering walls of water that break over the bow as angry white froth and foam.
Captain Leif Skog is absolutely in his element at the helm of the ship he helped redesign for just such seas. With our wing stabilizers out the ride on the ship cannot be described as perfectly flat, but surprisingly it certainly allows most of us the luxury of breakfast and excited talk of our impending sighting of land!
The seabirds that have been following the ship couldn’t be more in their element either, as they pace the ship, dipping, lifting, banking, and repeating the cycle over and over again. I stand on the aft deck and try to capture the effortlessness of dynamic soaring playing out right in front of my camera. I am truly inspired at the ease at which these birds handle the mountainous waves and screaming wind. Cape petrels, southern fulmars, and even tiny prions all seem to be enjoying the chance for high speed flight, making my success rate of in-focus images drop severely! The highlight of the morning for me came in the form of a southern giant petrel exhibiting an almost pure white plumage, a rare white morph.
Afternoon found the ship anchored off the Aitcho Island group. Our first landing of the expedition would offer two different nesting colonies of brush tail penguins; namely gentoos and chinstraps. The colonies were in full swing as both species had staked out their respective sites, and adults were incubating eggs as far as we could see. Giant petrels and kelp gulls patrolled overhead but the true threat to penguin eggs were the skuas, which would swoop in and grab an egg and be gone before penguin parents even knew what hit them. Time and again we saw egg thievery as hungry skuas had penguin eggs for lunch. An adult Weddell seal decided to haul out on the beach right in front of us as well, making the landing that much sweeter!
