After spending the afternoon out on deck and seeing only a few distant whales I was sitting down to write a journal entry about the lack of whales when two minkes started lunging out of the water next to the boat. Forgetting the irony of waiting six hours to see whales and having them show up ten minutes after I quit looking, these whales provided a lot of good looks during the fifteen minutes that they stuck around. However, aside from the few sightings that we’ve had it’s been an unusually slow trip for whales — Rod and the rest of the staff say we would normally be seeing dozens of whales at this point, but today we saw five, and three of those were fairly brief.
The day started with a landing on Brown Bluffs, which is an old volcanic formation that is now home to thousands of relatively human-tolerant gentoo and adelie penguins. Wanting to get away from the group I did a bit of scrambling up to the higher slopes, and had the countryside and penguins all to myself. A few of the passengers are grumbling that they’ve seen (and smelled) enough penguins to last a lifetime, but I’d be quite content to spend a lot more time down here with the little buggers. The next stop will be Deception Island, and as we’re steaming there the snow is falling heavily. Four more days on the peninsula to go, and I wish it was a lot more.