Antarctic Adventure - 2

From Trevor Potts in Antarctica:

We arrived at the South Shetlands this afternoon in brilliant sunshine and calm weather. As we headed past Nelson Island I noticed on the chart that this headland of columnar Basalt was called Fort William. There must have been some Scottish sealers down here in the 1820s when the South Shetlands were discovered and hundreds of thousands of fur seals killed.

Earlier in the afternoon when we were about fifty miles out we passed a small pod of Fin Whales and later a pod of Humpback whales. As we came through the entrance and passed Fort William there was a lone Minke whale just by the headland. Three species of whale and we were only just arriving in the Sub Antarctic South Shetlands. As we had had such a speedy crossing we had time for a landing at Aitcho Island. A peculiar name, it was named after the British Hydrographic Office – HO Island and now spelt Aicho.

We landed on the island in brilliant sunshine and no wind, a fantastic start to our journey. Each little outcrop of bare earth and rock sticking out of the snow had its own colony of penguins.

Some colonies were all Chinstrap penguins....

....and some were all Gentoo Penguins, here is a courting couple -

We spent three hours here just enjoying the beautiful snowy scenery and the antics of the penguins. They were mainly paired up by now with one of them dutifully trying to incubate their two eggs. Some of the more inexperienced birds were still trying to find a site out of the snow to build their little pebble nests.

We are now sailing south towards Brown Bluff the site of our long and difficult day in the ice last cruise - see previous Diary entry here.  Here’s hoping for better luck this time.

Trevor adds later - Too windy to land at Brown Bluff this morning but had great Orca sightings in Antarctic sound nearby.

Many thanks to Trevor for pictures and story.

Trevor runs the Ardnamurchan Campsite, website here.