Booth Island and Pleneau Bay, Antarctica
Ice and its many magnificent sculptured forms defined our day. First thing in the morning we entered the northern end of the scenic Lemaire Channel. This seven-mile-long channel between Booth Island and the mainland was full of floating brash ice and icebergs with glaciers dripping ice down the steep mountainsides towards the narrow waterway we transited through. Once on the southern end of the channel we turned west and north inside Pleneau Bay and a landing site on Booth Island where the famous French explorer Charcot spent a winter. All three species of penguins normally found on the peninsula breed here next to each other and everyone had a chance to see them in action and admire the mountainous landscape of Booth Island.
In addition, a Zodiac cruise among the icebergs was on offer. A spectacular array of shapes and sizes – many with magnificent arches and towers jutting precariously in all directions and ready to fall down at any minute – provided us with amazing scenes. It didn’t matter which way you looked, the stunning ice sculptures all around us were splendid to look at and greatly enjoyable. Some boats encountered seals – a crabeater seal sleeping peacefully on an ice floe, or a leopard seal swimming sinuously around the Zodiac, full of curiosity and grace, its large head looming from time to time far out of the water to get a better look at us.
Other boats found humpback whales, at times rolling over, at other times sleeping but coming very close to the drifting Zodiacs and giving people a fantastic view of their huge forms covered in barnacles, the sheer size and power of their long white pectoral flippers clear to see, their massive tail flukes that required only a small flicking motion to propel the whale down to greater depths. Even with many Zodiacs and a sailing yacht clustered around these two behemoths, the whales were unperturbed by the presence of people and fell asleep, moving slowly like logs through the bay and among the icebergs in their sleep. And so we left these beautiful creatures and continued on our way further south.
