Dorian Bay

While Nic was mincing in moonboots, I had signed up for the photography workshop.  I had decided to do a few of these as I could do with the help.  Sadly, whilst I did get some useful tips, most of my photos of Antarctica were fairly disappointing.



Part of this was that I had accidentally reduced the pixel level, which explained the early fuzziness, but I also had a problem with the lens getting wet or misting over.  Will have to solve this for next time I'm in  very cold place!


But back to today.
The shore landing was at Dorian Bay.  There was a lot of ice and small icebergs close to the landing site, and our zodiac driver took us around a few of them in search of the leopard seal that had been there earlier, but we missed it.  Even so, it was good to get up close to the ice, which comes in a variety fantastic shapes, textures and colours.  And the photo is not deceiving you, some of the ice really was that blue.
 

Dorian Bay itself is again uninhabited but for penguins, and there was less snow around the shoreline, so the guana was even more noticeable and you got pretty filthy boots.  This was not a place to fall over so I took extra care with my footing as I walked around.


Whilst I didn't get bored of looking at penguins, I am sure you will quickly get bored of reading about me watching them, so I won't say too much about that in my blogs from now on, but I will still post photos.


In any case, the penguins weren't really doing anything especially exciting today which did cause me a bit of a problem with today's photo homework.


The task was to take pictures of wildlife, but although I take a lot of general snaps, something has to catch my interest for me to take proper photos, and today the penguins didn't provide that.  So whilst I did take some penguin pictures, my photographs were more focused (no pun intended) on the ice.

On that score my luck was in, because our zodiac driver on the way back was Laurent, the photographer, so he took us back around the ice again, and was happy to wait while we all clicked away.

As we left the shelter of the bay and headed back to the ship, we realised how much the wind had got up.

The ship had moved closer to shore to make the journey shorter, but we all got pretty wet on the way back.  I was glad of my waterproofs keeping me nice and dry, but it was at this point that Nic discovered that his weren't quite so effective.   His trousers and thermals needed drying out afterwards.



We took it easy for the rest of the day as we were supposed to be camping on the snow that night.  Unfortunately the wind got up so much that it had to be cancelled as it wasn't safe to take the zodiacs out and they were worried about the wisdom of camping too.  It turns out they were right to be concerned.