MS National Geographic Explorer
Deception Island, South Shetland Islands
Monday, January 11, 2010

    The ship made good time across the Drake Passage – a very calm Drake that is affectionately referred to as the Drake Lake. I was up at about 5 am and made my way to the bridge. I spent a couple of hours scanning for critters in and above the sea, and had a little piece of a freshly baked chocolate pastry brought up to the bridge. There was a fair amount to see this morning, but not to photograph. There were a number of small blue petrels, some diving petrels, a few seals, some penguins, and a number of cape petrels.

    It wasn’t too long before small bits of land began to rise from the sea far out at the horizon. The South Shetland Islands were beginning to show themselves, but it would still be a few hours before we actually were cruising among them. Also, straight ahead, there appeared on the edge of the world an iceberg and a slight course change of a couple of degrees set our course for interception.

    This was a chunk of ice about a kilometer long with maybe 30 meters showing above the water. There were a few chinstrap penguins lounging on a ledge protruding from one side along with a lone gentoo penguin. The ship circled to the other side and we nosed up quite close to the sheer wall of ice.

    Following our short encounter with our first ice of the expedition, we turned our attention to the South Shetland Islands and in particular Deception Island. Deception is a volcano with its caldera flooded with seawater. We entered through Neptune’s Bellows, the name given to the section of the volcano wall that opens to the sea. Safely anchored, we landed by Zodiac to hike and view the remains of the bases devastated by the last eruptions at the end of the 1960’s. There is a colony of chinstraps that live on the outside of Deception, which we were not able to visit. However, we were met on the beach by three or four chinstraps, a couple of gentoos, and a lone adelie penguin. A hike up to Neptune’s Window allowed us to view the scenery and also observe the cape petrels nesting in the higher cliffs. There were also a number of kelp gulls and brown skua on the island.

    A few hearty (translated as crazy) souls accepted the challenge to swim in the Antarctic waters during our stay on Deception. Often, glacial melt water will be warmed by the thermal action of the volcano and will empty into the sea making the water slightly warmer near shore. Today, however, the water was not much heated, so the crazy ones were making very quick plunges in nearly freezing water.

    We departed Deception Island in the evening and are now on our way north to pass through the Antarctic Sound on our way to the Weddell Sea where we will head south along the eastern side of the Antarctica Peninsula into the areas of big ice.