Antarctica - Charlotte Bay

Another partially thwarted plan. We did dip the nose of the ship into Charlotte Bay, but again ice conditions kept us from going as far in as we were planning. There are moments of clear patches in the sky, but they do not last long.

Apparently we had to do a bit of running from the weather last night, winds kicked up considerably, so when I woke this morning at 3am we were “parked” in the lee of Brabant Island. In our exit toward Charlotte Bay, I saw some more whales doing some slapping of the water with their tails but nothing particularly close to the ship. The crew was out on the back deck this morning playing in the snow. For many of our Philippine crew members, this is their first experience of snow. They were having an excellent time holding snowballs for pictures and building a tiny snowman!

Despite not getting to go very far into the Bay, I enjoyed looking at all the differently shaped icebergs and bergy bits. We learned in one of the presentations that in order to be a true iceberg, it has to have over 5m of height sticking out of the water and a width of over 15m. Ice that falls shy of that is officially called a bergy bit. There are also smaller sizes called growlers for the noise they would make against a wooden hull, and finally the ice that might fit on your dinner plate (or your whiskey tumbler) is called brash ice. We didn't see a lot of this latter, but the icebergs and bergy bits and growlers were all over.Read more