It is difficult even to attempt to describe the beauty of Antarctica but the scenery is simply stunning. The Antarctic Peninsula’s mountainous, ice covered landscape with awesome glacier formations, seems to change almost by the moment in the varying light and weather. It is incredibly tranquil, with placid water with soft yellow and pink hues, only disturbed as we travelled through the water in the zodiacs.
In the four days we spent on the Antarctic Peninsula, we visited several different bays and natural harbours, making landings on the Antarctic continent; including Antarctic Sound, Graham’s Passage, Charlotte’s Bay and Portal Point, Neko Harbour, Cuverville Island, Curtiss Bay, Mikkelsen Harbour, Wilhelmina Bay and the Gerlache Straits.
On the first night we had anchored just south of Paulet Island and in the morning we went for a zodiac cruise. This proved to be one of the most memorable events of the trip. We had spent the morning in the zodiacs looking at a huge 5k wide tabular iceberg broken away from the Ronne Ice Shelf.
We were the first Zodiac back to the Vavilov and we both went straight to the top deck to continue to look around. Within a minute we had spotted Orcas (killer whales) and hundreds of birds in an apparent feeding frenzy, about 750m away, 8 o’clock to the ship’s lie.
We frantically shouted down and sent those zodiacs still out motoring over to the scene and we shortly joined once we had got back into a zodiac. What appeared to be a few Orcas from a distance turned out to be a pod of 12 Orcas collectively pack-hunting a Minke whale at about 15 knots, gradually tiring out the Minke by jumping on top of it and pushing it under the ice. It also became apparent that this was also a training exercise as the larger Orcas watched as the younger Orcas played the lead role in the hunt.
We stayed with the chase for over an hour, watching as another pod of Orcas in the vicinity joined the hunt. All in all, we were in the midst of 20 orcas and were so close at certain points that an orca actually dived under our zodiac.
Eventually we had to give up as the Orcas moved away under the ice. The Minke was already clearly tired (it would normally be able to outpace an Orca in open water) and would not have lasted too much longer; although we did not see the conclusion, we had witnessed one of nature’s amazing spectacles.
