Antarctica - Yalour Islands

This morning the ship repositioned at the Yalour Islands, still in the southern part of Antarctica. Luckily we were able to stay in this area to avoid the high winds and bad weather in the route back to Ushuaia that we would have taken.
We woke up to a thumping outside our outside wall / window. It was a smaller sized iceberg bumping up against the hull of the ship. As I watched it, 2 Humpback Whales breached right below the window. They were circling and diving under the iceberg. Coming up to the surface to blow water our of their blow holes. They did this for about 10 minutes. Then we heard a cracking sound and the iceberg calved in half right outside the window. Well, that was the morning wake up excitement.
We then had an early, 7 am, Special OPs boat ride. We saw more penguins (Adele and Gentoo) diving in the water and on the various icebergs. We also saw a Leopard Seal and Crab Eater Seal..
We returned to the ship and had another final Antarctic Zodiac Landing. This was a small rock and snow area for us to land with more Gentoo penguins, but not as many as we have seen before. Our guide said that they were the final set of offspring for the season and would all be gone in a couple of weeks back into the ocean to migrate. They landing spot had beautiful views of all the tabular, rounded and jagged icebergs in the bay as well as the mountains in the distance that were separated by the glacier that was slowly carving out the valley between them on its way to the ocean.
We were able to get onto a second Special OPs boat excursion and they took us through more of the iceberg field, visit a seal again, and really get the boat up to speed. Our guide said that the boat had 850 HP and could go 50 mph on the water. It is actually a military boat made in Finland for their military and high speed maneuvering in the ice fields. The cost is $1M USD each. After playing around, we headed back from our last trip out.
Then back through the Drake Passage where they announced that we 'should' have fairly smooth sailing. Fingers crossed...Read more