Paradise Bay

The ship got out of the channel and stopped in Paradise Bay. As we awaited boarding our Zodiac, a skua (skoo'- ah) flew by and landed on the bow. Skuas are large, brown seabirds that hang out near penguin rookeries. Our expedition leader, Susan, explained that the skua will grab hold of an adult penguin's tail and try to drag him/her off of their nest. If they are successful, they'll circle around and steal an egg to eat. Susan said she saw one skua get away with 7 penguin eggs in a single 40-minute timespan. We never saw any such activity because all of the eggs were long since hatched.

We boarded our Zodiac from the ship for our first cruise around the bay. There were 4 Zodiacs with about 10-12 passengers aboard each. Our first "stop" (we never left the Zodiacs) was the most amazingly sculpted iceberg. It was as big as a house complete with archways and upside- down steps along the waterline. The white of the iceberg just beneath the deep blue ocean made for a mesmerizing color of blue. We puttered all around the iceberg checking it out from every angle, watching another Zodiac through the giant arch.

Then we headed off to the glaciers. But first a detour. Our driver spotted a weddel seal asleep on a flat berg. We approached carefully and killed the motor so that we wouldn't wake him up. The Zodiac floated right up to the side of the iceberg and the camera shutters clicked like crazy. That woke him up. Surprised and dazed, perhaps like when we wake up from a deep sleep, he tried to figure us out. I guess he didn't like what he came up with because he slithered right into the sea away from us. What a unique encounter.

Now off to the glacier. Hey, there were all sorts of seals on all sorts of icebergs! Guess it wasn't that unique after all. They were crabeater seals and all of them were enjoying the implicit view of the massive glacier behind them. We saw a group of gentoos get up on the same iceberg as the crabeater seals, but our zodiacs frightened them back into the water.

The Zodiac never got anywhere near the glaciers because of the danger of calving -- a large iceberg that calves from a glacier can create a wave up to 12 feet high. The deep blue coloring within the glacier's crevasses is caused by ice that is highly compressed, so compressed that the air is forced out from between the ice molecules. One huge iceberg was turned to expose its serrated bottom that got recently scraped against the rocky mountain beneath the glacier.

Little "bergy bits" were floating everywhere. The ice chunks were up to the size of a bag of ice you could get at the convenience store. The drivers carefully piloted the Zodiac over the bergy bits. The bits made a lot of noise as they clunked and scraped the metal bottom of the Zodiac. It was as if we were driving over a bunch of floating rocks. No wonder the Titanic didn't withstand the hit -- it might as well have plowed straight into a mountain.

One of the drivers spotted a pair of humpback whales back towards the ship. So much for caution over the bergy bits -- our driver plowed right through them to get to the whales as quickly as possible. What a sight to behold having two 45-ton creatures calmly coming up for air. The Zodiac engines were off as we waited for them to come up again. All you could hear for miles around when they surfaced was the force of air shooting out of their blowholes. And then the camera shutters. A couple of surfacings later and they went for the deep dive exposing their flukes as they pointed their heads straight down into the water. Who knows where they would come up again? What better way to top off the morning's cruise than with such a proximate humpback encounter.

We boarded the ship once again and headed for our next destination. Beautiful blue skies complemented the pristine white glaciers and icebergs floating in the water. One particularly interesting iceberg resembled a punchbowl.