MS National Geographic Endeavour
Detaille Island (South of the Antarctic Circle)
Saturday, January 24, 2009

    Up at 05:00 again. It was light out, but overcast and a bit foggy. Actually, it was snowing. We had been sailing south all night and there was quite a bit of snow on the decks. At 08:00, all aboard the Endeavour officially became “Blue-Noses” as we crossed south of the Antarctic Circle on our way to Detaille Island. Getting there, though, meant bulldozing our way through the pack-ice with our trusty ship and its icebreaking capability. The captain and his crew hand maneuvered the ship around the big ice while just plowing through the ”regular” ice.

    This morning, we had a seminar on the role played by arctic sled dogs in the exploration of the Antarctic until relatively quite recently. They typically fed the dogs crab-eater seal; about six pounds each every other day (meat, blubber, and bones, but no livers). The dogs consumed all that was fed to them.

    We landed on Detaille Island, a small island in Crystal Sound. It is the site of an abandoned British exploration base. Our arrival was in the midst of the on-going horizontal snowstorm that we experienced most of the day. Snow was accumulating at several inches per hour and the air temperature was running about 25 F. The landing was difficult because of the weather and the fact that the landing had to be made at a sheer ice cliff. A brave crew took a Zodiac across and used ice axes to create about a two square meter landing zone. They then propped up an aluminum ladder so we could scale the cliff and attached a man-rope to the rocks above. They then used their boots to stamp a narrow walkway from the edge of the island to the old station site. We then landed by Zodiac and individually climbed the ladder, then scaled up the ice-covered stones, and made our way along the trail that they had blazed.

    The base was an exploration and mapping project that was scheduled to end the year the base was abandoned. That year, 1959, the pack ice never broke up and the ship that was to pick them up couldn’t approach the island. They packed up only survival essentials and hiked 60 miles over the ice to be picked up by ship. The base is still how it was left, with cupboards filled with canned food, papers still strewn on tables and bunks, etc. There was some discussion about tearing the site down and making it as if it never existed. Lindblad is considering sponsoring a restoration and maintenance proposal to the Antarctic Treaty members. There are a few skua that seem to own the small island and were not completely happy to have us visit. They have been known to attack people, but not necessarily here. Ours was the first Lindblad ship to cross the Antarctic Circle this season and the first to visit Detaille Island in a year.

    While we were visiting the base, the Oceanites hiked across a narrow ice bridge to an even smaller adjoining island to take a census of surviving chicks in an Adelie penguin colony there. As they have found all along the Antarctic Peninsula over the last few years, the Adelie population is declining while the Gentoo population is on the rise.

    After returning to the ship, we began our cruise back north. Our furthest south position was 66 51.9 S / 66 47.6 W. This afternoon Tim Laman, the photographer from National Geographic, presented a seminar about early Antarctic photographer pioneers of the Shackleton and Scott expeditions. This was in the era of 1910-1917. He discussed the equipment, conditions, and we even evaluated their compositions and compared them with what we are doing this week.

    This evening, we also had another report from our underwater naturalist with another video made during today’s dive at Detaille Island. Most of the area is barren due to the actions of the ice scraping the bottom, but they dived down to 72 feet, found, and video photographed the algae, kelp, sea stars, and sponges that they found.

    Tomorrow, we hope to have a shore excursion to investigate a Gentoo penguin colony near the southern end of the Lamaire Channel. Afterwards, we continue north through the channel for an afternoon landing at Port Lockroy, another old British base. This one is restored and apparently even has a “gift shop”. Since the site is small, the landing will have to be made in two shifts. While one group is visiting the base, the other will land at a nearby penguin colony. All plans are subject to change due to the unpredictable weather and sea conditions.