In the morning, we went to Cuverville Island, where we did a dive on a wall. When we first dropped down, it didn’t seem too wall-ish and more of a pebbly slope but after not too long we found ourselves on a wall that was quite impressively vertical. It had this kelp that came in these huge sheets cascading down the wall. Quite different from any kind of kelp that I’ve seen before. Aside from the kelp, there was various encrusting life on the wall, and some interesting bigger colorful sponges in orange and yellow. We started the dive with John and Clinton but eventually got separated by the bad viz — it was maybe 15 to 20 feet, though it was bright and blue, just milky. That’s too bad, since Clinton found some neat looking big dorids. We managed to make it to 40 minutes. I was about to thumb it based on cold hands when Rob thumbed it on gas (he was quite the hoover on this dive).
After the dive, we went to shore. There was a pebbly beach that had penguins hanging out on it and going in and out of the water and up and down the snow slope above the beach. I hung out on the beach and briefly got into the water (Rob was trying to do over/unders and shallow water photos with his camera in its housing). After entertaining ourselves with the penguins for a little while, we headed back to the boat.
In the afternoon, we dove on an iceberg, which was way cooler than the previous dives, and way more “Antarctica”. We made a small mistake when we started the dive, by dropping down and swimming toward the iceberg, rather than swimming over to it and following it down. As a result, we didn’t make it to the iceberg until 50 or 60 feet, and the viz was pretty bad. We saw several interesting jelly critters right at the start of the dive, and then, just like that, I was separated from Rob. I think I may have gotten sucked a few feet shallower by the halocline. Then I looked up and saw an overhang above me. So I swam out from under it and then I was in blue water, with no iceberg or buddies in sight. I figured it was pretty hopeless, but did the “search for 1 minute” thing before doing an ascent. I came to the surface right next to an iceberg. Henrik saw me and motored over and just as he was coming to me, Rob surfaced, next to a different iceberg. That was the one we were supposed to be on — I had drifted over to the next one. So Henrik gave me a fairly painful and terrifying tow back over to where Rob was.
We reunited and headed down, this time following the ice down to about 30 feet. The water was much clearer there and we had a ton of fun playing with the ice! It had this cool scalloped texture that reminded me of certain Florida caves, like Indian. And touching it was really neat, because it looks like snow but feels like ice. Only a few spots are clear like ice. Anyway, it was super fun and really neat, despite the dramatic start to the dive. We did about 35 minutes, and I didn’t even check the temperature during the dive, because I was so entertained by the ice.
We went to shore again, and once again we just hung out near the beach, while a few others hiked up the slope. Rob had packed his land camera in a dry bag for the landing, so he was taking pictures of penguins. I didn’t want to get sweaty in my drysuit, so we just hung around on the beach, where there were lots of penguins. Just before we got in the zodiac to head back to the ship, they started the polar plunge. Brrrr.