Another beautiful day

We started the day cruising through the Lemaire Channel which is so beautiful it is call the Kodak Crack. I almost hate to say that I stayed in the cabin and enjoyed my coffee and sweet rolls and watched out the window as I knew we would be returning the same way later in the day.

Our first landing was Peterman Island where we had a number of choices in where we could go. Jim went one direction to climb a hill that overlooked a bay full of icebergs; I chose another direction and headed off to the closest penguins. I ended up on a wonderful tiny peninsula with a colony of both Gentoo and Adelie penguins and a couple pairs of nesting cormorants. I sat down on the snow just off our path and was rewarded with several hundred great photos. I probably could have sat there happily all day, but our time on each landing is limited to an hour so we headed back to the landing and caught the next boat back to the ship. Now we were really ready for lunch so after shedding our outer clothes we went to the dining room to eat. After lunch we passed through the Lemaire Channel and we got a number of photos. There were two of our Polar Circle boats in the water filled with some international journalists that wanted to film Fram with the great scenery. For us it meant that we could include the small boats in some of our photos to give a little size perspective.

Late afternoon we arrived at Almirante Brown, an abandoned Argentine base. There are still some buildings standing here but it is no longer operated. I headed off to the nearest penguin colony and Jim went of with the rest of the people to climb a large steep hill. Most of the people made it up the hill and got to slide down ‘on their bottoms’. It looked like so much fun, but I didn’t think my old bones would handle it. There was one final small hill at the bottom and I got this picture of Jim.

Then back to the ship for a late dinner -it was about 9:00 which is very late for us to eat. After we finished we ended up back on the deck taking photos until almost 11:00. The water was perfectly calm and the reflections of the snow-covered mountains and icebergs were too good to pass - especially with the late sunlight. Finally we hit the bed at a little after 11... And slept like babies until 8:00 this morning… More later. Two landings a day is very tiring, but I wouldn’t miss any of them.