Day 91 Deception Island and Hanna's point

January 21, 2000

Deception Island is horseshoe shaped and has hot beaches. It is the top cone of a volcano there one side caved in allowing the sea to form a "lake". This one side has steam rising out of the shore, looks like thermal pools.

But that's the Deception.

We have sailed into the inside of an "active" volcano, the ground warms the water.

Rachel is wearing a swimsuit underneath the long underwear, wool sweater, long pants and raingear. About 2 dozen of us have come prepared to swim. After hiking up to a point called Neptune's Window, where land further South had been spotted by earlier expeditions. Rachel removes all the layers and goes into the water. The lady Russian Doctor is out in the coldest water splashing and swimming around, then out into the hot pool. Then back into the cold and back in the hot pool.

For Rachel and most others, the hot pool is too hot to sit in and instead sat in the sand at the edge of the water where the hot and cold water mixed. Sometimes there would be one spot really hot mainly from the hot rocks.

Finally, Rachel gets up her nerve to go out into the cold water...brrrr... this took her breath away. Someone had pulled her into the cold water up to her neck and for about a nano second before frantically trying to get out of the that d*mn cold water. Quickly sitting back on the edge and splashing warm water over herself, the tingling stops and "I felt invigorated", she says and goes back in for a second time.

While Rachel is on the "beach", Patrick walks towards the west where remains of several buildings tell the history of this island. A set of large holding tanks for oil sit, washed off their foundations by volcanic mud streams. A large rusting collection of steel boilers, pipes and furnaces make up the Norwegian Whaling station. Further on are several wooden buildings, now starting to fall apart, where the British Antarctica Survey once was housed. Further along the curved beach lays a large hangar behind which is left the body of a plane. For some reason the wings and floaters have been removed and stored in the hangar. Patrick looks around trying to imagine the activities here, so far away from the rest of the world.

These penguins look like they have a bicycle helmet

We get in a zodiac to return to the ship. Rachel is shivering all the way; she had only put the rain pants back on over the swimsuit. A warm shower back on board really felt good.

We continue on to the Shetland Islands and Hannah's point. We will be in the first passenger zodiac. The first zodiac takes the leaders across to find the Macaroni penguins and mark out the path we can take to the see the penguins.

What a landing!

This landing was a scaled down version of when we crossed the Drake passage in a hurricane. Sonja is our driver. She apologizes up front this would be a bumpy and wet ride. The wind is strong, the waves choppy and there was snow beginning to fall.

We see 2 Macaroni penguins and a colony of chin straps and a colony of gentoos. In the midst of the colony on a big flat rock are sea lions lying around on top of each other. Boy, did they smell bad! They were surrounded by curious gentoo chicks.

The weather is getting worse. The captain sounds the ships horn meaning we are to get to the zodiacs and back to the ship as quickly as possible. The ride back is a "little" gentler and the ship has been brought in closer for a shorter ride.

This is our last landing and now we head for Ushuaia through the Drake Passage.

We are given a special show after dinner by humpback whales feeding. There are 40 or more diving, blowing bubbles to lounge feed. The captain has turned the boat in a giant circle and at one point, backing up to stay with the whales. Some would dive from one side of the bow and surface on the other side.

What an incredible sight and early enough before the everyone takes Dramamine and becomes drowsy.