Port Lockroy

The first thing we saw at the penguin colony was a massive fin whale skeleton. The fin whale is the second largest whale (after the blue whale). The skeleton has been there forever, and every year they have to reassemble the skeleton after the weather blows it apart all winter. Our on-board whale biologist, Ingrid, explained that the bones of a whale from the neck down can map one-to-one with the bones of a human. She pointed out that this particular whale had arthritis because some of its bones showed deterioration the same way arthritic human bones do. Who would have guessed?

The gentoo penguins are similar to the chinstraps. They do all the same things, but they have different calls and a different look about them. Gentoos are champion poopers. They pooped more than any of the other penguins I saw, and they did it in such a unique way. They bent over slightly and launched it out of their butts like a flame thrower. It made a distinctive noise and traveled up to 2 yards!

The BAS station had so many gentoos hanging around that you couldn't maintain the mandatory 15ft distance. They were on the steps of the museum and all along the walkways, and they didn't care that we wanted to use them. So we were advised instead to walk very slowly around them. It seemed to work.

The Port Lockroy facility has a souveneir shop (of course) and a post office. I mailed 2 identical postcards to my home address. One of them made it a month after I mailed it. I don't know what happened to the other one. Mail is picked up by a passing ship and delivered to the Falkland Islands, where it is transported to England, and so on. Dave and Nigel also stamped our passports for us.

The museum itself was pretty small. After all, it used to be a research station that housed a maximum of 9 people. A plaque explained that when the site was fully inhabited, they took turns chopping ice off the nearest glacier for the station's water supply. Since nobody particularly enjoyed that job, they only got as much ice and snow as was required to sustain the place for another day and to allow the ice-fetcher to take a bath. That means that everyone took a bath once every 9 days. I can see why they closed the place down.

Dave and Nigel came aboard our ship that evening to take their own showers and to join us in a barbeque out on the bow. While we ate dinner I saw a couple of small icebergs calf off the glacier nearby.