After two long days with very early starts and deck watches until last light, I needed a bit of a lie in. This decision was reinforced overnight by feeling the ship moving a lot in the sea. So, I had a lie in until about 07:30 which allowed time for a look at the conditions from the lounge over a cuppa tea before heading off to breakfast. The sea was lively and the conditions were living up to the Force eight gale that Expedition Leader Ali has promised us, or was that warned us, about for the journey back across the Drake Passage. The plan for the morning was a zodiac ride around the South Shetland Islands, but that seemed optimistic.
As we got closer to the South Shetland Islands, the seas and winds picked up. But that's not too unusual as the wind and sea can increase due to funnelling through the islands. We checked out the planning zodiac location and it was clearly too rough to consider anything.
Ali & the Captain checked out a couple of other locations, hoping to find a more sheltered area, but to no avail. When I spent time on deck, I saw a number of expected Southern Ocean Seabirds, but this Antarctic Tern was the only species I photographed.
By later morning, it was clear that we weren't going to get a final zodiac ride in the South Shetland Islands: c'est la vie. Plan C was adopted which was to start out a bit earlier for Ushuaia. This would give us a bit more time to the cross the Drake Passage. However, it also meant we passed through a very rough channel between two islands just as we went to lunch. This made for a very bumpy meal. In hindsight, I guess the catering team would have preferred for the ship to stay in the lee of the islands for an hour to finish lunch, before we covered that rough channel. But it was to be a quiet lunch for those of us who ate, as about twenty to twenty-five passengers had retreated to the cabins and we didn't see them again until the final afternoon as the seas finally moderated as we reached the Tierra del Fuego coastline. I was really pleased that the sea-sickness patches were working well and I was able to carry on Birding & eating, despite it being a Force eight gale and corresponding seas.
We also had a couple of large Whales, either Fin Whales or Sei Whales, but given the sea conditions we did well getting any photographs at all. Sadly, these had to go down in the notes as not specifically identified.
The rough conditions brought a number of the non-wildlife passengers up to bridge wings with the hope of getting the perfect photo of the sea breaking over the bows. I never succeeded to get this photo. But the next two photos show how much we were moving in these seas, which had moderated a bit from the even rougher seas around the South Shetland Islands.
Sadly, it felt like our Antarctica trip was all too rapidly coming to the end. However, we still had two full days at sea left and so there was still time for some interesting Cetaceans. However, I'm sure quite a few of the passengers that evening were wishing we only had two hours of these seas left to endure.