Antarctic Circle

We saw some humpback whales this morning after breakfast. This day has a very loose plan, get south of the Antarctic Circle, and see what we can do.

After we crossed south of the Antarctic Circle they had a goofy little party with King Neptune of the seven seas, some mermaids and some pirates showed up on the back outside deck.

It looks like the first landing place they considered had too much ice to get to, we tried to land on the continent, but turned around because there was so much ice.

After lunch, we saw three Humpback whales, one was a youngster. It is cold, windy and a little drizzle, but folks stayed out for 20-30 minutes watching the whales feed, as they surfaced very regularly often two or three times a minute.

At 66° 55' south, near the south end of Laird Island, we found the edge of the pack ice. This is the furthest south any ship from this company has come. There are seals out on the ice. We did a one-hour zodiac tour in and around the edge of the pack ice. We saw crab eater seals and a Weddell seal.

This ship doesn’t have enough zodiacs that everyone can get off on a zodiac tour, so we split in two groups and take turns. We were in the first group, and the second group found a Ross seal a little further out. These are very rare along the Antarctic peninsula as they live on the other side by the Ross ice shelf. The expedition team leader hadn’t seen one in 27 years of coming here. So they gave the first group participants an opportunity to go out again and see it. We spent nearly 30 minutes out there looking at it from several sides of the ice floe it was on. I think the expedition team really wanted a good look at it.