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February 18th 2008

Published: February 18th 2008

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Dolphins Bowriding

karpase

Gentoo Penguin

I just came back from a 10 day cruise to Antarctica on the M/V Polaris. It was one of the greatest experiences of my trip.
We started sailing through the Beagle channel, which was quite nice, and we saw lots of sea birds, and a few magellanic penguins. Then, we had two days sailing through the Drake passage, which is infamous for bad weather and rough seas. Fortunately, on the way down to Antarctica, we had great weather and calm seas, and we even got there half a day earlier than expected, and so we were able to land on Aitcho Island on the evening of our third day.
I won´t bore you with details of all the landings we made during the following four days, mostly because I don´t remember the names of all these places, but we had two landings every day, on different islands with different animals.
We saw different types of penguins: Gentoo (with the orange beak), Chinstrap (with the white head), and one little Adelie penguin. We also lots of types of seals: Crabeater seals, Weddell seals, Leopard seals, Elephant seals and fur seals, which aren´t true seals, but more like sea lions. We also saw

Chinstrap Penguin

Humpback whales (really closely, more later), Minke whales, Killer whales (we had great views of them swimming close to our ship), and on the very last day, dolphins. We also saw lots of sea birds: Albatrosses (including the Wandering Albatross, the biggest bird in the world), Petrels, and other, not so cool birds.
We also had a zodiac cruise through ¨iceberg alley¨, which is a small inlet full of icebergs. We saw lots of cool looking icebergs, and lots of seals on smaller ones, and we also had a humpback whale swim under our zodiac, which was really cool, and a little scary.
I also joined the ¨Antarctic Swim Team¨, with 30 other passengers. Basically, on a really cold day in Whaler´s Bay, Deception Island, we jumped into 0 degree water (it´s not ice because of the salt), and swam (for about 2 seconds) before running out freezing. At least everyone who did it got a free drink that evening.
The reason I know so much (Ok, not so much, but at least their names) is that we had a great staff, which included a marine mammal biologist, an ornithologist, and a historian (why? because the stories of Antarctic explorers

Skewer

An evil scavenger bird that like to eat penguin chicks. I decided to spare you the picture where they actually do that.

are pretty interesting). We also had a great expeition leader and assistant expedition leader, and a 60 year old (about 60, I wasn´t going to ask) Scottish woman who drove zodiacs. All of them were very knowledgeable, and very friendly. The ship itself was a russian ship, with a russian crew, including the waitresses and maids (yeah, we had maids that made our beds twice a day for some reason), so it felt a little like being back in Israel.
The other passengers were also great. About half of them were pretty old (they had white hair, I don´t know how old it makes them), and the other half were about my age, and were fun to hang out with. Even some of the old people were cool. Of course, I taught a lot of people to play Yaniv, and we passed quite a lot of time doing that. I even taught one of the old Americans how to play, and he might just be the oldest Yaniv player in the world.
I think I wrote too much, but not to worry, you can just look at the photos.

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