Tuesday 10 March was a cruise day with a bit of a sail around Elephant Island and hopefully Point Wild, which have significance for Shackleton’s story.
From what I can piece together from what others told me, part of the expedition made it to one side of Elephant Island (the bad side) then crossed over the mountain over 36 hours to make it to the nicer side.
They stayed there for four months (?), ate a lot of penguins and seals, and were then rescued. There’s a statue at Point Wild now (which isn’t meant to be there but is) to commemorate this rescue.
We weren’t expecting to do much there but go next to the island in our cruise ship, but at about 10am the captain said the weather and water was good enough for a cruise around in zodiacs so we all scrambled to get ready.
The zodiac trips were meant to be for 15 minutes but time blew out and we left for our cruise an hour late (not that it mattered).
Point Wild has a number of rocky islands that ascend to peaks that are covered in Chinstrap Penguins.
These penguins are well-known rock climbers, jumping out of the water to scale the rocky cliffs to spread out across every available space.
We zoomed along, taking some photos of them, went out to the ocean side of the island and around to where we could get a better view of the statue and the surrounding penguins and fur seals.
Better still, two Leopard Seals were swimming in the waters nearby waiting to pick off penguins.
Hooray! We finally saw Leopard Seals (and being in the Leopard Seal group we were pleased to see our namesake) but no hapless penguins were harmed during our visit.
We were probably out there for about 30 minutes before heading back to the ship.
There’s also a glacier on Elephant Island that had been calving but we missed the chance to see a huge chunk of it fall into the water.
Next time!
The staff who were on our zodiac said that they’d not been able to do the cruise in this area before because the seas had been too rough, so we’d really lucked out on this trip getting to go places not usually visited.
Back on the ship, we went off to lunch while others went on their tour.
Later that afternoon we had our clay modelling workshop.
This was one of the activities promoted at the start of the cruise where people got to make a little clay penguin.
Such a simple thing but we were all very excited to make our three centimetre-tall penguins.
Not everyone showed up so I made a seal as well.
After painting them, we set them on the window sill to set. One day later they were still a bit squishy.
We played Sushi Go and Monopoly Deal in the afternoon.
We only have the French version of Monopoly Deal so trying to explain the game to people who’ve never played before and translate what’s on the cards made for a long game.
Glen then went off to another medical lecture while I hit the gym before our late seating of dinner, after which we played Ticket to Ride (Glen won) then went to bed while crossing the Drake Passage.
Only a few days still to go!
Travels with Dan 
What do you say, eh?