The forecast was for good weather today, so Jerome stayed up all night to navigate the boat to Possession Bay, thus allowing Ted and the group to start off on the Shackleton Crossing at dawn. Jerome is something else — once he had dropped them he didn’t sleep but instead went ashore with David and I to visit a king penguin colony, and then motored on to Fortuna Bay where he single-handedly hacked footholds in icy-snow up the side of a cliff with an axe so that he could get from the beach to an overview of the Fortuna Glacier. The man impresses me greatly.
After leaving Fortuna we motored through icebergs to our mooring at another abandoned whaling station in Leith Harbour. Unlike Prince Olav, this station was operational until the mid-60’s and seemed more like an industrial plant than a historical relic. I briefly looked around, but the massive machines and huge buildings made it all too clear how whaling was once a heartless, assembly-line process, and I returned to the boat early.
After six days here our time on South Georgia is one-third over, but that still leaves twelve days for exploring. I’ve fallen into the routine of time ashore with wildlife interspersed with boat trips, meals of mutton or some kind of stew, and late evenings talking or looking through the day’s photos. Memories of home are happy ones, but they are acquiring fuzzy edges that weren’t there two weeks ago; life is good right now.