The day after the storm. We all survived, with all our stories to share, and now it is a picture perfect, blue sky, sunny day. Our first on this trip. I’m still groggy from the night time tossing and turning (and probably the Dramamine as well), but Ed is up and about – taking pictures from our balcony of these monstrous icebergs we’re sailing past.
Most are tabular – looking like a huge flat table floating by. They almost glow with blue light as they majestically pass on either side of the ship. There are too many to keep track of during our morning sail toward the Weddell sea. I finally roust myself out of the bed and we head to the outer decks to get a panoramic view of these beauties (or what the Captain continues to call “big babies”).
The day is sunny and bright (Jerome reminds us to lather up on the sun block), but cold. It doesn’t look like it should be that cold with the sun, but the wind will freeze you out in a heartbeat. We bundle up in our parkas to watch as we sail right in between two monsters. Niko gives us his commentary as we go by – these two are grounded (meaning the ice reaches all the way down to the floor of the ocean), and very old – you can tell their relative age from the striations on the outer edges (from the freeze-thaw cycles).
The scenery defies explanation with mere words. It is impossible to adequately describe these blocks of ice, 10 times the size of this ship, thousands of years old, sitting here with the water lapping (and sometimes crashing) against their sides. Hopefully the pictures (once we can post them) will provide some sort of perspective and the same sense of wonder as we felt all day gliding past this incredible display of Antarctic beauty.
We sail all morning past the bergs, the growlers and ice floaters, watching penguins atop small ice floes glide past, finally turning into the Weddell Sea, renowned for it’s impressive ice packs. It is here that many ships have been stranded, becoming captured by the floating ice sheets and pack ice that suddenly appear here. We of course, aren’t going quite far enough to become trapped, but the Captain does deftly navigate around the open sea so that we can view the landscape around – snow capped peaks in the distance, icebergs of various sizes and shapes all around – and of course the penguins on the ice sheets! Because this is an ice-hardened ship, we sail straight through sheet ice, watching the thick slabs break apart at our bow and slide past along the sides of the ship.
This is a lazy day – peacefully sailing around in fabulous weather. It’s a lovely reward after the exhausting night we’ve spent.
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