Lemaire Channel

At the end of the short channel we stopped for another Zodiac cruise. Just to the west was the Iceberg Graveyard, a place where huge icebergs got caught and stuck in a large bay. We were off to see some monstrous pieces of ice.

We weren't in the Zodiac for long when our driver and ship whale biologist, Ingrid, said that she thought there were about 10 minke whales in the area. Two seconds later a pair of minke whales surfaced about 20 feet behind us. Their blowholes startled me. Good timing on the prediction, Ingrid. As we were trying to follow the minkes around a leopard seal sped towards us in the water. The seal was quite curious and proceeded to do a water ballet all around our boat. It swam around and under us over and over again, all the time peeking its head out looking at us playfully. How neat.

More (or the same?) minke whales surfaced very close to us. Ingrid explained that it was rare for a minke to get anywhere near a Zodiac. She noticed that one of them was injured and bleeding. We could see their white underbellies as they swam upside down next to us -- they were feeding.

We headed towards the massive icebergs. The largest one must have towered almost 8 stories next to our tiny Zodiac -- it produced my favorite picture of the whole trip. We motored around it and found yet another flat iceberg with a couple of lounging leopard seals. We approached quite close on all sides of the berg. The seals looked mildly annoyed at us, as usual.

We spent so much time watching the whales and the seals that we had very little time to check out the other mammoth icebergs. They were unbelievably large. I couldn't imagine what it must have looked like beneath the surface of the water where the other 90% of the iceberg was! We had to race around the icebergs to get back to the ship on time. On the way back we passed 3 icebergs that were all connected together beneath the water (see below).

After our awesome Zodiac cruise we headed in for dinner. Susan announced that the ship was continuing on towards the Antarctic Circle at 65 degrees south. When we hit the circle, she'd make anouther announcement and then we would head back the way we came. So we hit the circle and by the time I came up from dinner, the ship had reached the same place we stopped for the Zodiac tour as if we'd never moved. But we did.