Date - 29 November, 2016
Weather - Overcast, 1 degree, very cold
Seas - Swells early morning, relatively calm
Sunrise - 2.55 am
Sunset - 11.14 pm
Everyone was tired this morning after yesterday's excursions and it was palpable at breakfast. We all seemed to have squinty eyes like the macaroni penguins. There's a few bugs going around including the flu, sore throat and diarrhoea and the doctor seems to be keeping busy. We suppose this is the down side of living in confined areas and going out into the freezing conditions. Overnight Henk started experiencing earache and a pain around the left cheekbone area. He visited the doctor and there is no evidence of a middle ear infection. He took the day off from going outside in the zodiacs with the very cold conditions.
During the night we moved further down the Antarctic Sound and dropped anchor at Mikkelsen Harbour at about seven o'clock. The harbour is on the southern coast of Trinity Island on the northern end of the Palmer Archipelago and was first discovered by Norwegian sailors on the Swedish Antarctic Expedition in 1901 - 1903. It was subsequently used by whalers for mooring their factory ships. Our ship had to moor about two kilometres from the landing area so it took longer to get all the zodiac groups off the ship as the first groups were ferried to the island. We firstly cruised around the harbour before making a landing. There were a number of glaciers coming down to the shoreline and they looked spectacular. We haven't seen any glaciers calving yet.
We landed on the very small D'Hainaut Island in the harbour. Today we had to walk on snow for most of the time. It was very thick and if we went off the track it went up to our knees as it was also very soft. The island is home to a disused whaling hut and a Gentoo Penguin colony with many penguins sitting on their stony nests around the hut.
The nesting areas were the only places which didn't have snow and they weren't large areas for the penguins. The penguins had many hardened walking tracks which we had to avoid. These tracks make it easier for them to go to and fro from their colonies to the sea.
We felt we had earned the selection from the hot buffet lunch after our morning excursion. The energy in the group had returned at lunchtime after the invigorating morning on the snow.
We moved further south to Cierva and dropped anchor at two thirty. The water was very calm with many large icebergs and quite a large amount of floating brash ice and sea ice. We spent about an hour and a half cruising the shoreline in the zodiacs as we weren't able to land. The area is managed by an Argentinean research station named Primavera and they strictly control the area. The icebergs were large, all different and stunning. The aqua blue in the oxygen-deprived ice is spectacular.
We went quite a distance from the boat and it was exhilarating to be in such an isolated part of the world. Our expedition leader turned off the zodiac's engine and it was very quiet.
After we returned to the ship the other half of the passengers went exploring. We had a lecture from one of the expedition leaders, Dick, on four expeditions in the early 1900's which became frozen in the ice over the winter period and their subsequent stories of being rescued. He also touched on Mawson's expeditions. It was a fascinating lecture.
Dinner was a bar-b-que on the back deck at seven o'clock. It was freezing and at times snowed. We donned our expedition gear and sat with Cathy and Chris eating our bar-b-que fare. It was very tasty but as soon as we finished the dessert we scooted inside to the lounge area where it was wonderfully warm.
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