By Mark Flager, Sales Manager | November 29, 2018 ( Comments)
Penguins! Lots and lots of gentoo penguins! We stepped onto the continent at Brown Base, a scientific research station not yet manned for the summer, during our call at Paradise Bay Sunday morning. This was a magical moment. There was something in the air as well – Federico, the seal expert on the expedition team, pointed out it was penguin guano. “Later in the season, we can smell it from the ship,” he said.
On a scale from chicken poop to horse manure, the smell of penguin guano tends toward the equine – acceptable, even tolerable, within limits.
The expedition staff marked a trail for a short hike up to a lookout point, which included a few steps hacked out of ice. As advised in the briefings, the penguins move about on well-trod “penguin highways” most of the time, some of which can cross the “red penguin” trails. At such intersections we of course defer to the birds, who do not seem to take any notice that we are here. They have a few vocalizations, a lecturer said; to the layman, it's a lot of urgent squawking that makes for the only background sounds other than the wind, some muted conversations and the scrunch of boots on snow.
The ship then repositioned to Cuverville Island for afternoon wet landings. The island is noted for a breeding colony of about 6,500 pairs of gentoo penguins, and nesting sites for southern giant petrels and Antarctic shags. Adelie penguins also nest on the island, but the two breeds keep to themselves, the lecturers said.
Happily enough, Maddie and I found ourselves in Group 2 in the kayak lottery, and the weather was fine for an excursion on Sunday afternoon. When kayaking is possible, there isn't time to do a wet landing and a kayak excursion, so you skip the wet landing. We met the kayak leaders for a last-minute briefing and the signing of release forms, and then headed to the mud room for distribution of dry suits, a life vest, mittens and booties. A dry suit is like pajamas with footies, only waterproof, and is seriously tight at your wrists and neck; one of the expedition team likened fitting your head through the neck opening to “being born.” Thermals, socks, pants and a warm top are underneath all that. The final accessory is a rubber apron that you wear on your hips; it seals you in to the kayak and keeps water out.
Six two-person kayaks were pre-positioned near the zodiac landing site on Cuverville Island. It's a team effort, the expedition staff said – some guests will help hold an empty kayak against the zodiac as someone sits on the edge, puts their feet in the kayak, turns and slides in. Others pass paddles as one of the expedition staff, already in a one-person boat, assists on the far side to secure the apron to the lip of the opening. The kayaks have pedals inside for steering; my legs were too long to use them comfortably, so after Maddie got in the front, my 40-year-old canoeing experience kicked in and we were underway, paddling around “bergy bits” and massive ice formations with five other kayaks and two expedition leaders.
We moseyed around past the landing site, past eclectic shapes and forms – boulder-like bergs, flat-topped sheets, 15-foot-tall curved and sculpted shapes streaked with parallel grooves. Penguins occasionally popped up and back down again. It was serene. We followed our guides to the back side of the rookeries where we found a quiet lagoon with some Adelie penguins standing around the water's edge.
We had been out more than an hour when we turned back to retrace our path to the landing zone. In a very short period of time, the waves kicked up and we were doing some serious core work paddling against the wind and waves. We assumed this was routine, but after awhile, the expedition guides called for zodiac pickup nearer to where we were.
It was routine, of sorts. A katabatic wind had come up and they decided we did not need to battle it all the way back. I had to look that up:
“A katabatic wind (named from the Greek word katabasis, meaning "descending") is the technical name for a drainage wind, a wind that carries high-density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity. Katabatic winds can rush down elevated slopes at hurricane speeds, but most are not as intense as that, and many are of the order of 10 knots (18 km/h) or less.”
So we had a dramatic and fun end to the excursion – under darkening skies, with racing winds, in what had to have been six-foot seas (more likely one-foot), bouncing and separating from the pickup zodiac, finally coming alongside and then flopping less-than-gracefully into the zodiac, transferring the other half of the group from their pick-up zodiac into ours, racing back to the ship in bounding waves, yelling a pirate's “Arggh!” every time we hit cold spray. It was a blast. The expedition guides and the pickup drivers were superb; we could not have been in better hands.
