• Antarctica: Andvord Bay

    18. Februar 2023, South Atlantic Ocean ⋅ ☁️ 28 °F

    Mui and I were looking forward to returning to Paradise Bay … one of our favorite places in Antarctica … near where we made our first continental landing in 2007.

    Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. There was too much ice at the entrance … Insignia is not ice-hardened. And we presented too big of a sail for the wind that was blowing at 22 to 30 knots.

    Instead of sticking around just because Paradise Bay was the listed “destination” for today, we moved on to Andvord Bay … to make the best of what the Antarctic gods handed us … in true expedition style.

    It was a mostly B&W sort of day, but we enjoyed amazing, larger-than-life polar scenery, passing some of the largest icebergs of our trip thus far. We also saw plenty of gentoo penguins rafting by on large bits of ice … close enough to clearly identify them.

    But the highlight had to be the “whale fest.” It seemed like they were all around us … mostly humpbacks and a couple of minkes. They showed us some amazing feeding behavior … often in quite close proximity to Insignia. In fact, Mui got our best whale footage to date when a humpback surfaced next to the ship and went about feeding as though we didn’t exist in its universe. (Alas, the file is too big to share on FindPenguins, so the short snippets I took with my iPhone will have to suffice.)
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