Excursions in the Weddell Sea

We're taking advantage of another day at sea to share more excursions from our time in Antarctica. While writing this, we are just about across the Drake again and headed back to the Beagle Channel at the tip of South America. (The Drake was rough last night, but we are almost through it now).

Why not open with a sunset shot from the evening of January 22nd:

One of the many Antarctic sunsets we would enjoy during our adventure.

January 23rd: Excursion 1 was a Zodiac cruise that took in ice formations and observed more Adelie penguins. Once again, the ship's crew put us in extraordinary weather, and we took in the awesome scenery.

This is Coburn island, the site of our morning Zodiac cruise that put us in range of Adelie penguins, Antarctic shags, and Skuas.

On the approach to the island, we got much closer to extremely dense ice formations (the more dense the bluer the light reflected. The island is also home to a large Adelie colony with a larger diversity of birds than we'd seen.

Quite the blue sky - and we think this bird is a snow petrel??? Not a perfect image, but the photography lessons are certainly helping.

From the Zodiac we were able to get very close to the wildlife cruising along the ice. To the left, the resolution is not the best but you can see the "blue-eyed" shag. We also got to witness a turf battle between two Skuas on part of the sea ice. It was an excellent morning for the cruise.

From that point we returned to the ship for a barbeque lunch atop of the 8th deck of the ship. Yes, we confirm that we've experienced an Antarctic summer cookout!

After some down time, the crew scoped out and found a massive piece of sea ice. After some scouting and preparation the guides deemed it safe to be able to take a walk on the ice. We were very fortunate as most sea ice is not so stable at this late in the Antarctic summer. Nonetheless we were thrilled to get this opportunity!

We knew we would get to hike and have plenty of time on Zodiacs, but the sea ice walking was an incredible experience! So glad we were able to find the right spot with favorable weather.