Friday 6 March was a big travel day as we headed south in an attempt to land at Red Rock Ridge.
Today we will first attempt to sail through the narrow passage way, The Gullet. If we make it through, we will attempt a landing at Red Rock Ridge.
Red Rock Ridge is part of the Antarctic continent proper (everywhere else we’d landed was an island) so that caused a bit of excitement but the picture of the landing point looked incredibly precarious.
Unfortunately, due to the swells we couldn’t land but that didn’t mean we didn’t have an awesome day.
At some point during the night we crossed the imaginary and moving line of the Antarctic Circle. Hooray!
We also passed through The Gullet, a narrow passageway with islands, icebergs, and glaciers on either side of it. It was very pretty.
I watched a geology lecture after breakfast.
I can’t remember a lot of it except it was about plate tectonics and the exciting thing was how quickly the Indian Subcontinent moved over a relatively short space of time (~100 million years) to slam into the Asian plate and create the Himalayans.
Most plates more 7cm/year but the Indian was really sprinting. Fascinating! Unfortunately no one knows why.
Glen and I went for a dip in the jacuzzi while giant icebergs floated past, including one with about seven arches in it.
It was so impressive that the boat went around it.
After a bit more of a soak (the jacuzzi was over 40°C and the pool would have been at least 30°C so all very liveable), we had lunch followed by a quick look at metamorphic rocks under the microscope.
A few more people that day, plus it also gave me a chance to ask the expedition leader about living and working on the ship. It’s got potential…
I then attended a lecture on the cooking habits of the explorers during the Heroic Age (~1870–1922).
With a lack of fresh meat in their supplies, they supplemented their meals with whatever they could catch.
Penguin sounds disgusting (but still edible if cooked right), seal’s brains were a delicacy, and penguin and seal liver was also prized.
Fish were hard to catch but you could get them if the seal you killed hadn’t digested them in its stomach yet.
Roald Amundsen killed the working dogs, but that was planned from the very beginning.
Elephant Seal is basically inedible.
During the lecture, there was an announcement about a pod of orca feeding in front of the ship so the entire room jumped up and ran outside.
Sure enough there were about ten orca up ahead feeding on what I presume were fish.
I’ve never seen orca so this was a real treat. We watched them for ages though sadly they didn’t come very close to the boat (smart animals).
The whale researchers jumped into their zodiac and went out, collecting skin samples (but also to get close to these amazing animals).
It took a long time to get back to the lecture and by then I think I’d missed about 20 minutes of it. Still, it was one of the interesting ones.
“Cut in thin slices and fried in butter, [penguin] challenges comparison with chicken or turkey.” –AL McLean
We then went through an icefield, which was really cool (literally and figuratively), where we saw a heap of Antarctic Fur Seals lounging around on sheets of ice.
I love them so much. They’re beautiful animals.
This was also where we stopped for our landing on Stonington Island.
It was a late landing because we’d had to move on a few times from Red Rock Ridge, with each stop constituting a deployment of the expedition team to see if it was safe to land.
Luckily the sun sets pretty late down here.
We were eventually given the chance to go out, the zodiac struggling to make it through all the big blocks of ice that were collecting. I loved it.
Stonington Island was home to a UK and a US station but both have since been abandoned and, to avoid having to pay for the clean up and removal, are being “conserved”.
The stations are made mostly of wood and surprisingly haven’t rotten completely away despite being last used in the 60s (or around then).
There’s junk everywhere, including a couple of old tanks, lots of string, glass bottles, and other bits of crap.
The UK building has a similar design and layout to Vernadsky (Faraday) Station, which makes sense, but now that it’s unoccupied and completely dark, it’s scary AF.
There are still things in the store room but the bit that really fascinated me were the shelves filled with Penguin novels (detective and spy stories mostly).
There were a lot of books.
Can just imagine a ghost haunting its rooms and I would not want to have to spend a night there, especially with the wind howling and the darkness all encompassing.
Back on the boat, we went to dinner and watched one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen as the golden light burst through clouds, across glaciers and ice, and illuminated sleeping seals.
Truly blessed.
Travels with Dan 
What do you say, eh?