After leaving Charlotte Bay we slowly sailed through the Gerlache Strait to Culverville Island (red circle/ white #5).
The island houses around 7000 pairs of nesting Gentoo penguins, and I think we saw – and smelled – most of them. We also saw hundreds and hundreds swimming through the waters at what seemed breakneck speeds. Sometimes they would stop and float along or play in place – or maybe they were having a snack. They would bob around in a gaggle (not an official term) and suddenly take off again. It was nearly impossible to get their picture, but here is a chop of some video.
The island was covered in the sea birds as far as we could see. The white areas are snow and ice, rocks are dark, the brown is packed down penguin poo. We watched through binoculars as they waddled around, going about their day, raising their chicks, swimming and eating and doing penguin stuff. I just want to indulge in great belly laughs every time I see these magnificent little creatures. I know the pictures aren’t great, but perhaps you can get a sense of the island’s appearance.
After a long but extraordinary day filled with humpback whales, orcas, krill swirls and bubble nets, thousands of penguins walking and running on snow and rocks – and swimming and leaping in the sea, seabirds harnessing the wind as they ride the currents and glide behind the ship, drifting along the Antarctic Peninsula past ice covered mountains over 9000 feet high and the most inhospitable but fabulously beautiful landscape on our planet, and navigating amongst icebergs from massive behemoths to bergy bits to growlers and sea ice, we settle into this last night at the southern “end of the world”.
Rather than sailing through the evening, the ship will sit quietly overnight just short of reentering the Gerlache Strait. Tomorrow morning we will begin our final day here, and start back to civilization. I find myself becoming melancholy at that thought.
Standing on the balcony at the back of the ship, even with lights and heat and civilization just steps behind me and under my feet, it is easy to gaze at the scenes before us, get lost in the stillness, and slip away into mental and spiritual solitude.
Psalm 8 says, in part,
8 “O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens…
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!”