After two days at sea we finally arrived in the early morning at South Georgia. The next four days were targeted at visiting the incredibly dense wildlife that calls the island home. According to some of my fellow passengers South Georgia is the “Serengetti of the Antarctic” and it is one of the main reasons that this particular cruise is so popular; many other Antarctic cruises go straight to the peninsula completely bypassing the island. David woke us up at 6:00 am so that we could experience the Drygalski Fjord, a planned side trip for our ship at the southern tip of the island. Dutifully everyone woke up and either congregated on the bridge or in the lounge to watch the stunning scenery go by as we entered the fjord. The wind was incredibly strong, channeling through the area with gusts at 80 knots. Even though traversing the fjord was a treat, we were discouraged from going out on deck to take pictures. Each side of the channel leading into the fjord consisted of high cliffs plunging dramatically to the water. The cliffs were composed alternatively of solid ice where multiple glaciers joined in a massive pile up or dark rock buried under huge snow and ice packs. The morning was cloudy lending an eerie, isolated feel to our journey. At the back of the fjord numerous glaciers combined to form a huge sprawl of ice plunging into the bay. As we were emerging, after the ship performed a graceful 360 pirouette in the tight confines of the channel, the sun struggled to pierce the clouds, creating some dramatic and interesting lighting effects across the ice and water. It was beautiful!

Some of the dramatic lighting displayed on our way out of the fjord. I love trying to capture interesting sky effects!

Trooping off to a late breakfast, we settled down to wait and see if the weather would cooperate. Launching zodiacs from the ship had several constraints, the greatest being the amount of waves or sea swell and the intensity of the winds. Too high of waves or swell and the zodiacs could get caught under the ship while loading passengers. Too high of winds and the small lightweight boats could potentially be flipped- neither outcome desirable. Because the winds were still very high as the morning progressed David decided to skip our first destination of the day, Gold Harbor and move farther north to Royal Bay, an area a bit more sheltered with the hope the conditions there would support a zodiac excursion. His plan was to return south to Gold Harbor after lunch to see if the winds had calmed down enough to support a shore landing at that time. Unfortunately reaching Royal Bay we discovered that the waves were not cooperative so we spent the morning on the boat watching the island out the port windows.

Putting people in the picture helps to show some of the scale of the landscape. It was beautiful.

After lunch, however, as we headed into Gold Harbor, we got lucky. The sea state was calm and the winds were manageable so we geared up and started the landing operations. It was a spectacular afternoon. As we washed up on the beach it was easy to loose focus while disembarking because the distraction caused by the amazing number of king and gentoo penguins around us. The beach was full of them, apparently home to about 50,000 birds. But also scattered around the area, in big piles of brown and gray, were tons (literally!) of elephant seals. The elephant seals were juvenile, not full grown adults, even though they looked plenty large to me. Occasionally one would wake up and snarl at a neighbor, leading to some belly pushing and biting before things would settle down again to a confusing pile of seals snoozing on the beach.

In clumps dotted across the landscape around the seals were penguins too numerous to count, hurriedly marching here and there on business only they could know. The gentoo penguins were moving around much more than the king penguins who tended to stand in one place, beaks pointed slightly in the air as if they smelled something offensive, ignoring all the activity around them. There certainly was plenty to smell, between the dense collection of penguins and the overwhelming odor that accompanies the elephant seals, a fragrance that brought to mind a collection of skunks, only more so. The noises produced by the various inhabitants of the beach also contributed to the intensity of the experience. Various king penguins at random times would tip their heads back even more and with their beaks pointing straight up towards the sky, start a very loud warbling like call. The gentoo penguins sounded to my mind a bit like off-key birds and would vocalize while moving through the hoards of king penguins- perhaps they were looking for each other among the mass of larger birds. As for the elephant seals, they made the same noises that juveniles of any species engage in- snorting, hissing, grunting and growling. The snorting was constant, almost as if they had running competition to see who could chuff the loudest and longest. Their constant noise and odor made them fairly easy to find, even in the brush and vegetation surrounding the beach, where several piles of seals had stationed themselves after a laborious climb up the beach.