Deception Island

When Delphine gave us our briefing about what we would be doing today, we were a bit taken aback to hear that we would be having to get up at the crack of dawn.



We had known that we would be coming to Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands, and that it was worth being on deck to watch the arrival, but we hadn't expected it to be so early.

But she had explained her reasons, and we were all convinced that it would be worth it.

So it was that we were on deck, at 6am in the cold mist of the early morning, to see Ortelius make its cautious way through Neptune's Bellows. Deception Island is in fact a volcano. Not an island with a volcano on it, just the tip of a very large volcano sticking up out of the ocean.

And it is an active volcano that is overdue an eruption. Though we were assured that there are plenty of devices measuring activity so there should be good warning for us to escape to a safe distance.

In a previous eruption, many many years ago, a small section of the wall of the volcano collapsed, allowing the sea to flow into the crater, or caldera.

Ships can sail in through this narrow 255m gap, called Neptune's Bellows, but have to be very careful of Ravn Rock which sits just beneath the water and has claimed ships in the past.

The volcano is huge.  The diameter of the caldera is an enormous 15km.  And it is somewhat surreal to be sailing into the heart of an active volcano, but be surrounded by ice and snow.

The captain navigated his way through the bellows, pushing the ice out of our way as we went, and we were soon safely approaching the old whaling station where there was a pre breakfast landing scheduled.


And for those who were crazy enough, this was also the opportunity to take a polar plunge - not usually so much a swim in the antarctic seas as a quick dash in and out.



We took a look at the weather - snowy, misty and cold - and decided that as we had no intention of getting in the water, there were no penguins here, we had done similar before, and we could get a long range view of the whaling station from the warmth of the ship, we would skip this landing and get in early to a leisurely breakfast instead.

When everyone was back on board having breakfast after the short landing, the ship moved to a different position in the caldera, and pushed its way into some of the sea ice.

From here, Delphine had arranged with the helicopter pilots that we would all be taken up for a short flight around the top of the caldera, to get a birds eye view of this unique island.

This is not something that the trips usually offer, so it was a great opportunity, and why we all forgave Delphine the 5:45am wake up call.  The mist had by this time lifted a bit, so although visibility wasn't amazing, it was good enough to get a fabulous view of the volcano.

As we passed over rim and looked out across the vast expanse of the crater, we could only just about make out the tiny form of our ship, wedged into the ice, which gave us some perspective on just how big the caldera is.  you can just about see it on the very left side of this photo, about half way up. It was a great extra to the trip and we all enjoyed it.

Back on ship, they had lowered the gangways either side, and we were able to get down on to the sea ice and walk around.  With no wildlife to look at and no science stations to visit, this felt a bit like when the schools close due to snow and everyone just goes out to play.

The type of snow doesn't really make good snowballs we discovered, but people were making snow angels and posing for silly photos, and just generally having a bit of fun in the snow.

One of the silly photo opportunities came about when the crew lowered the front mooring line over the side of the ship.  Of course it was ridiculous to think that people would take photos of each other with this huge rope in hand pretending to pull the ship; but we still all did it!  And we also all got together for a big group photo in front of Ortelius.



All in all we had a good morning on Deception Island, and were definitely ready for our lunch.

The Drake Shake

After a calm evening passage through the Beagle Channel, during which we did our lifeboat drill and met some of our fellow passengers, we were ready to hit the Drake again in the early morning. Unfortunately bad weather conditions meant that we were delayed leaving while the helicopters waited for clearance to get onto the ship.

We eventually got underway after lunch, and as last time the Drake quickly claimed a number of passengers, sending down to their cabins for the duration of the crossing.  And on this occasion, Nic joined them.  He wasn't seasick -it started before we hit the rolling waves, so we figured it was a bit of bad shellfish the first night.

In any case, he rejoined us part way through, and in the meantime I went to a few of the lectures and presentations, and spent time watching the albatrosses (black browed, wandering and the very pretty sooty mantled), the petrels (cape and southern giant), southern fulmars, slender billed prions, sooty shearwaters, cormorants and other birds that I lost track of the names of.

We had been expecting a slightly older group of passengers than on our last trip, as that one was quite activity based, whilst this was a bit more sedate and more expensive. And that did prove to be correct.

But what really surprised us was the number of people for whom this was not their first Antarctica trip. There was Sharon, who worked for a travel company specialising in polar tours, so she had been many times, albeit paid for by work, and lots of those on board were on their second or third time.

But Elizabeth, a retired school teacher from Australia goes on multiple trips every year. She told us that she spends next to nothing on anything else, and gets good deals from the firm she books through because she goes so often, but still, we were amazed at how regularly she goes.

I loved Antarctica, and there are lots of different parts of it to see so I can quite understand wanting to back, and of course to the Arctic too, but still I think I would like to travel to a few other places sometimes!

There wasn't really a big group of people that we hung out with this time around, but we soon settled into a pattern of doing our eating and drinking with various people.

In particular we spent much of our time with Sharon, Elizabeth and two other couples. Mark and Tina from Chicago were on their first trip, as were Jeff and Nicky from Madison, Wisconsin.

During the trip we hoovered anything that we would be taking ashore to make sure we didn't introduce any non native seeds etc, and collected our rubber boots, so we were ready for when we reached the Weddell Sea.

Off to the White Continent again

With my sister having been over from Hong Kong for the funeral too, all three of us were flying out on the same day, so my mum drove us up to the airport.  With only going for the couple of weeks this time, we had lighter than usual rucksacks which was rather nice. 

Our route through to Ushuaia was in three stages.  The first was a ten hour flight to Miami.  We arrived there at 16:05 local time, which is 21:05 UK time.  But then we had to get through immigration and customs.  It seemed to take forever to walk from the plane to passport control, but we were pretty lucky once we got there as we got moved over to a shorter queue.  It still took forever, but not quite as long as it might have done.  We went through the rigmarole of fingerprinting and photos being taken, but made it through OK.

We then collected our rucksacks and joined another queue to pass through customs, before making our way outside to try to find the shuttle bus to our hotel.  Just about every hotel's bus passed us at least twice before ours finally turned up, and then it was a good half hour out, so by the time we actually got to our hotel it was about 8pm, or 1am UK time.

The next day was Thanksgiving, but we didn't get to see any of it as we were straight back to the airport for our next leg, a nine hour flight to Buenos Aires.  Because we we flying on a connecting flight the next day, we had a free transfer to our hostel, but it was slow going.  The bus from the airport to town was OK, but then we had to wait quite a while while they ferried us all on to our final destinations in taxis.  So having dropped off our bags and washed up, we were just in time for an argentine time dinner at 10pm.  We decided to hit one of our favourite places from before, so walked the few blocks over to Don Julio and enjoyed a good steak.

 

In the morning we took a cab to the airport for our very early three and a half hour flight down to Ushuaia.  A quick cab to the Antarctica hostel which we had used before meant we were soon relaxing in the same room that we had last time.

 

It was a long trip, but it was made much easier by the fact that we knew BsAs and Ushuaia, so we could relax and just fit back in to those places.

 

We went back to a couple of good places we'd been to before in Ushuaia, a buffet asado and a nice bar, and then in the morning had a long relaxing brunch and a few beers in the hostel before walking down to the docks in the afternoon to pick up the Ortelius.

On board we found we had been upgraded into a suite which was rather nice, and soon discovered that we had three of the same staff on board as last time, Delphine, Jim and Katrine.