Deception Island - Half Moon Island

Whaling Ghost Town & A Bit of Sunshine (Finally!) 

Wednesday January 2, 2008

Today was our last day of landings before heading back north across the Drake Passage towards Ushuaia and the end of our cruise. Both landings were different enough to make the experience fresh and interesting once again. 

In the morning we visited an island formed by an almost-completely-closed donut-shaped and still active volcanic caldera.  The captain had to guide the ship through a very narrow opening into the interior bay of Deception Island, but once inside the middle of the donut, the glassy lagoon provided a protected and very calm place to anchor the big ship and drive the zodiacs about.  Whalers discovered the advantages of this protected location long ago, and they ran a shore-based oil-extracting factory here for about 20 years in the early part of the 20th century.  The water of the lagoon was bloody red and choked with discarded carcasses during the height of the whaling operations - not a pretty site to imagine. Now all that's left are the rotting hulks of the old buildings and extraction boilers. They almost blend in completely into the barren backdrop - a surreal layering of desolation upon the almost (but not quite) lifeless island.  

The caldera is an active volcano, as evidenced by the sulfurous steam from various femoral vents wafting up and down the beach. The last major eruption was about 35 years ago. The island has a historic pattern of erupting every 30 to 40 years. It's due, and we're walking around like there's no problem. Of course not! We have an "evacuation plan."  It think it's something like "run that way," (which would be away from the lava, whichever direction that might happen to be). 

Of course the penguins are oblivious to the eerie history of the island and the graveyard aura of the old factory. They just hop and march up and down the beach like they own the place.

Deception Island,

with teams of busy penguins marching too and fro...

and the buildings of the old whaling factory.  

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And the special treat for the afternoon - sunshine!  Finally, after 5 days down here in Antarctica, we got a serious dose of sunshine and some nice blue sky for the backdrop of our photos. The previously hidden mountains that popped out of the mist made our jaws drop even a little further than usual.  The afternoon's landing was on Half Moon Island (shaped like a crescent, of course).  The dominant breeder here is the Chinstrap penguin, but we also saw Gentoo penguin, Kelp gulls, skuas, Storm petrels, and a handful of all-white Snowy sheathbills. There was also one lone Macaroni penguin standing alone and un-matched amongst the chaos of a Chinstrap rookery. 

At anchor off of Half Moon Island.

A Kelp gull guards it's nest. 

A recent count placed the number of breeding Chinstrap penguins on this island at well over 3000. 

Snowy sheathbill scavenge penguin eggs and guano.

Here's the lone Macaroni penguin - he/she looks lonely. Maybe next year another one will show up and the couple can breed.

And of course, as on just about every landing location, we see the reliable Gentoos, entering and/or exiting the water, and "porpoising" about on the swim.

The penguins are amazing and determined climbers, considering how clumsy they are on land.

Beautiful sunshine, beautiful mountains, beautiful views...

A family snowball fight...

and it's another family member's extra-special day. 

Happy Birthday, Lynn!

-Rolf