Antarctica 2023

Way back in early 2019, GUE announced that they were organizing a trip to Antarctica, in February 2021.  Clinton, John, Rob, and I had been talking about figuring out a way to dive in Antarctica for several years, so when the announcement went out, we jumped on it right away and secured our spots on the boat.  Of course the 2021 trip was canceled due to COVID, and rescheduled for 2022.  We almost went in 2022, then the Omicron surge happened, and well, it was canceled again.  At long last, in January 2023, we had a trip that was NOT canceled, almost 4 years after we initially booked the trip!

It was a LONG trip, even though we were only in Antarctica for 5 days, I think the total trip was 16 days.  I was a bit nervous about leaving Pepper for so long, but luckily Kevin and Ted each agreed to stay at the house for a few days while we were gone, spaced out so that Pepper never had to go that long with just the cat-sitter (and of course Pepper was fine).

The play-by-play:

Getting to Ushuaia and Ushuaia

From Ushuaia to Antarctica

Day 1: Gerlache Strait, Orne Harbour

Day 2: Gerlache Strait, Cuverville Island, Danco Island

Day 3: Lemaire Channel, Port Charcot, Yalour Islands

Day 4: Foyn Harbour

Day 5: Deception Island

Back across the Drake Passage

Less than a Day in Buenos Aires

A Day(-ish) in Buenos Aires

Recoleta Cemetary

 Since we had to fly through Buenos Aires anyway, we decided to spend a day there on the way back instead of more time in Ushuaia.  We got there late at night and left in the early evening the next day.  So we had a morning and afternoon there, and no chance to eat dinner.  Since it was the summer, it was hot.  So I don't think it was a bad thing that we didn't get to stay longer.  We spend the day walking around a bit and visiting Recoleta Cemetary, a street market, and eating a little bit of street food.

The airport was kind of a nightmare, but on the plus side, once we finally managed to get checked in (the nightmarish part) and through security, they had a variety of tasty empanadas at the American lounge :)

Back across the Drake

The trip back across the Drake was definitely sportier than on the way south, though nothing too bad.  But the outside decks were closed for about a day and a half of the passage, and lots of people disappeared into their rooms because they were seasick.  On the worst night, it was a bit hard to sleep, just because of all of the movement -- I remember waking up in the middle of the night and feeling like I was swinging from head to toe.  It was also kind of annoying to get around the boat on one afternoon.  On Thursday, there were 4 lectures, all of which I attended — one I can’t remember (?), one on how whales play a role as “ecosystem engineers” (by moving nutrients from the deep to the surface, so phytoplankton can bloom), one on penguin evolution, and one on “human impacts on the polar regions”.  The last one was really more a presentation on how penguin populations have changed over the past 40 or so years, and then various conversation topics, including plastic pollution and cetacean entanglement/by-catch.  We also did a debrief on the diving operations with Faith.

I took no pictures of the scenery on the trip back (probably because the decks were closed for so much of it), but here is a nice picture of the last dinner aboard, which was kind of a fancy affair.

Antarctica 2023: Day 5: Deception Island

In the morning we went to Deception Island (in the Shetland Islands), which involved passing “Neptune’s Bellows” on the way in and out. We saw the bellows from our port holes but were too lazy to go out on deck that early in the morning to get a better view. Deception Island is sort of C-shaped, and you have to pass through this narrowing to get inside of the C and that’s where you land, dive, etc. The island used to be used by whalers for processing whales, and so it has a bunch of buildings/artifacts from that time, and tons of whale bones both on the beach and underwater. The interesting shape of the island/bay is because it is an old volcano caldera, so all of the sand and rock is volcanic. It’s the blackest black sand beach I’ve ever been to.

The dive was on a black sand slope and was advertised as a whale bone graveyard, or some such thing. There were indeed whale bones, but I would call this a muck dive, as there was also tons of life on the slope. There were (not too interesting) brittle stars and urchins all over the slope and the bones. But there were also lots of nice-looking anemones, star fish, more of those cream-colored dorids. And we found two of the giant sticky-footed (?) starfish, one of which was posing with several of its arms raised. Those things are so neat, even cooler than the sunflower stars (formerly) in Monterey! Clinton also found the first “big” fish that I’d seen on the trip, which was apparently an antarctic cod. Though I think it was way too cute to be a cod. Overall it was a very fun dive. When Clinton got cold and called the dive, we worked our way up the slope and finished in about 15 feet.

Afterward, we went to shore, where there were some chinstrap penguins right along the water. There were some buildings we could go and look at, but at the very opposite end of the beach was a southern elephant seal pup, so we made the long walk over to see him. We watched for quite a while, as the pup hung out on his back, in a pretty un-photogenic pose. Just as we were about to leave, he finally flopped over and did some cute things… like a big yawn, scratching his back, scratching his ankle, and also just looking at us.

We headed to Half Moon Island in the afternoon, which was a 4 hour motor from Deception Island. Unfortunately when we got there, there were 40+ knot winds and no place to put the boat so we could deploy the zodiacs. So after a bit of faffing around trying to make it work, we headed out of there and towards the Drake Passage.

Antarctica 2023: Day 4: Foyn Harbour

Tuesday was the first day that we had blue skies, but we were warned that with the blue skies we would get wind. In the morning, we went to Portal Point, but it was too rough to put the zodiacs in the water, so there was no landing or diving :(. Instead, we headed to Wilhelmina Bay to look for whales, which we saw quite a few of. There were a few small groups of humpback whales feeding and fluking, but nothing crazy interesting. It was really quite windy out on the deck watching the whales though.

In the afternoon we headed to Foyn Harbor, where there is a wreck of a whaling boat. It is half above water and half below. I was honestly not that excited about a wreck, but it was a pretty cool dive. There was a lot of encrusting life, like anemones and these yellow finger-shaped sponges, both on and around the wreck. I also found 4 slugs that I have yet to identify, that had this squiggly white pattern on their backs that reminded me of a lettuce sea slug.

When we surfaced, Rob stayed in the water to do some over-under, while the rest of us hung out on the boat. The weather was super nice — blue skies, very nice scenery around, and it was high 40s. Rob eventually got back in the boat, then after a little while he decided to get back in the water and snorkel with his camera. At some point we got word that there were 40 knot winds at the boat, so we couldn’t return just yet. Then shortly after that we were told we could in fact return to the boat when we wanted to. But it was a good excuse to stay out longer.

A few of the divers were agitating for a second dive on the wreck, and they managed to convince the powers that be to do it. I opted out, since at the moment I was told I needed to decide, I still could not feel all of my toes. In the end, it took a while for them to get off the boat, so maybe I could have done it. But the wind had kicked up and I think I was happy to stay on the big boat.

Antarctica 2023: Day 3: Lemaire Channel, Port Charcot, Yalour Islands

We were once again encouraged to get up early, this time to view the scenic motor through the Lemaire Channel, which is a narrow channel with lots of icebergs and snow-covered mountains along each side of the channel. It was unfortunately raining, but it was indeed quite scenic. So I went out and stood on deck to watch for a while in the rain. Eventually we got to Port Charcot, where we spent the morning.

Our first dive was another iceberg dive, this time on a grounded iceberg. We were diving with Clinton and Sergio, and Rob and Clinton were hoping to get pictures of each other. We descended properly (following down the ice down), and went down to around 60 feet where we hung out for much of the dive. Rob and Clinton both did well getting pictures of each other! There were some really neat overhangs that I spent some time posing under. We went down to 80 feet at some point and still could not see the bottom of the iceberg. We eventually headed up to 40 feet but after not terribly long there, Clinton and Sergio headed up and we followed them up shortly after that, for an approximately 25 minute dive. My hands were just too cold!

There was a leopard seal on the dive that several teams saw zooming by around 10 feet. But of course we missed it :(

We went to shore after the dive, and this time we climbed up the snow a bit to look at the penguins. Still no babies.

In the afternoon, we moved to the Yalour Islands. There were a lot of icebergs nearby, so we thought we’d dive one of them, but they weren’t stable enough, so we ended up diving along a spit of rock that ran across from a small channel from the island we were landing on. There was a seal perched on top of the ridge, so we were hoping for some seal action. The site was sort of boring, but we had a fun dive anyway. There was a slope consisting of small boulders that were mostly scrubbed clean but had some kelp, lots of limpets, and the occasional colorful sponge or starfish. We found a giant isopod and played with him for a while. One interesting thing that happened on the dive was right after we dropped down, Rob pointed behind me and there was a small round-looking iceberg drifting along. It was cool and terrifying at the same time.

We once again went to shore after the dive and this was our best landing yet. There were tons of Adélie penguins, in many different colonies, and several were sitting on their chicks! There was a little path in a loop that was marked that you could walk along and see all of the groups of penguins. The chicks were very cute, but the adult penguins were doing all kinds of funny things too, like sliding across the snow on their tummies, or just waddle running across the path. There were views on both sides of the island that were really good too. I almost didn’t go to shore after the dive because I was so cold, but I’m glad I was talked into going by Rob!

Antarctica 2023: Day 2: Gerlache Strait, Cuverville Island, Danco Island

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.

Antarctica 2023: Day 1: Gerlache Strait, Orne Harbour

We woke up early for the cruise down the Gerlache Strait, which we were told would be beautiful and worth getting up very early for.  We planned to get up at 4am, but considering how poorly I’d slept (due to the boat rocking), I slept in until 5am.  It was definitely scenic, with icebergs and snow-covered mountains, though there was low cloud cover and rain, so I’m sure it could be more scenic :)  

The plan for our first day in Antarctica was to do a shore landing at Orne Harbor in the morning, and then our checkout dive at Orne Island in the afternoon.  Right at the end of breakfast, they announced that the ice conditions at the landing spot for Orne Harbor prevented us from landing, so we’d do zodiac cruises instead.  It was raining quite hard, and occasionally sleeting/snowing.  It was pretty “miserable” weather, but since we had our rain gear on and were all bundled up, I thought it was pretty fun to zip around in a zodiac in horrible weather :). We saw a couple colonies of chinstrap penguins up on the rocks, with a mix of gentoo and chinstraps hanging out closer to the water.  We also looked at some icebergs and some nice ice cliffs.

We had a fairly short break between lunch and meeting up by the dive skiffs, because we needed to get our tanks initially set up.  They allocated divers to skiffs, and we managed to get one of the skiffs designated as the BAUE boat, which meant it had 6 people in it (I think all of the other boats had only 4 people).  While we were getting into our undergarments, there was an announcement that due to wind conditions, the afternoon landing was cancelled.  But diving was still on; phew.  I was honestly a bit surprised they took us out, for a checkout dive no less, in the conditions that we had.  It was sporty!

It took a while for everyone to get their gear set up, into their suits, the boats into the water, and people onto the boats.  But eventually we made it out of there and found a spot for the checkout dive.  I think the only criteria for the dive site was that it be shallow and relatively protected; in other words, not really any guarantee that there’d be anything to see.  Rob and I were the morons that were underweighted (probably because we have *really* heavy single tanks at home, and didn’t have any information about what the tanks we were diving actually were), and had to go back to the boat to get more weight.  Once we had that figured out, Rob grabbed his camera from the boat and we went back down for a dive of about 30 minutes.  It was a pretty boring dive site — a pebbly bottom with some kelp and algae, lots of little “bug” crustaceans, even more limpet/snail things, and we did find one giant isopod, which I held in my hand and posed with :). My hands and face (the uncovered part) were freezing, but I was otherwise okay temperature-wise.

At the end of the dive, we were waiting for the skiff for a bit, and while we waited for the skiff, my feet started to get cold (I guess because all of the gas was squeezed out when I went vertical) and I was holding my hands in the air to get gas in them in hopes that would warm them up a bit.  When the skiff finally came to get us, I was like completely incapable of getting my gear off because my hands weren’t working.  So Rob had to help me a lot, which of course he was delighted by.  After I got back into the skiff my hands hurts so much that I felt nauseous.  But luckily that passed pretty quickly and feeling returned to my hands pretty soon after that.

Antarctica 2023: From Ushuaia to Antarctica

The Beagle Channel

We boarded the boat around 4pm on Wednesday, and were shown to our room, which was quite nice.  After a bit of unpacking, we headed up to the bar, where there was a safety briefing and a presentation about how things would generally go on a daily basis on the trip -- basically morning wakeup call, breakfast, morning landing/activity, lunch, afternoon landing/activity, daily wrap-up (where we would go over the plans for overnight/the next day) and then dinner.  Then we did the evacuation drill, so we went to our rooms to get our life jackets and then went to our muster stations and stood around for a bit.  Later there was a welcome cocktail hour with the captain, followed by a buffet dinner (dinner is usually not a buffet, just this first night it was).

There was a lot of wind in Ushuaia — the whitecaps in the harbor were crazy — so we were a bit delayed leaving the dock.  But we ended up getting going around 8pm.  We lost cell reception sooner than I expected, though we passed a port town in Chile on the way down the Beagle Channel and briefly had it back.  Also on the way down the Beagle Channel, we had some super awesome red skies, which various people attempted to take pictures of.

Our room

We stayed up fairly late in the bar, and by the time we went to sleep, I guess we were still in the Beagle Channel, because I remember thinking that I could barely tell that we were on a moving boat as I was falling asleep.  I woke up in the middle of the night and the boat was moving more, so we must have made it to the Drake Passage, but it wasn’t a lot of boat movement.

The forecast for Thursday day was reasonably okay, and it was in fact quite calm.  Well, there were whitecaps all around us, but the boat ride was very comfortable.  We attended a lecture about birds we might see on the Drake Passage (with a focus on albatross) and cetaceans.  We also attended the mandatory dive briefing.  After that, we dragged most of our dive gear up to the dive hangar, and put together weight belts and stuff.

Other than that, we ate 3 meals and spent a fair amount of time out on deck looking for (but not really seeing) interesting birds or whales.

The forecast for the next day was that it would be much worse, it was supposed to start overnight, so we were told to secure everything in our cabins.

The much worse weather didn’t really materialize.  Well, there were apparently 35 knot winds, but the ride was quite comfortable.  I guess the wind direction was favorable.  In the morning there was a talk about history of exploration of Antarctica, which we skipped (too many lectures in one day) and then another one on photography.  The crew member presenting on photography (Christian) is from Norway (and had a mix of Arctic and Antarctic pictures in his presentation); it left me really wanting to go to the Arctic to see some polar bears!  In the afternoon, we had all of our outdoor gear inspected for “biosecurity” and then Faith gave a talk on diving in Antarctica, and there was also a talk on penguins, specifically the ones we’d likely see on the trip (chinstrap, Adelie, and gentoo).

Overnight, in the middle of the night, it got fairly rough — rough enough that it was pretty hard to sleep just from the back and forth motion.  But by the time we woke up it was much calmer.

Antarctica 2023: Getting to Ushuaia and Hanging out in Ushuaia

The boat leaves from Ushuaia, Argentina, which is roughly the edge of the universe.  They call themselves the southernmost city in the world.  You can even go to the tourist office and get a passport stamp claiming this... which I did, and I'm still mildly concerned it has invalidated my passport.  So it's not surprising that it's a little hard to get to.  We flew to Buenos Aires on American (via Dallas), and then flew Aerolineas Argentina to Ushuaia.  This airline was very difficult to deal with.  Their online reservation system seems to be backed by a non-transactional system, so after going through the reservation flow, you might end up with zero or one (or maybe two, because it failed and you retried) reservations.  There was also a lot of rigamarole about overweight bags, as their baggage limitations are very strict, and a bag just can't be over 50 pounds, no matter what you are willing to pay.  So overall, it was a huge pain in the ass to get our flights sorted out, though once we arrived in Buenos Aires and checked in at the ticket counter, it was no big deal at all that we had overweight luggage (though we did have to pay a small fee).

We flew out of SFO on New Years' Eve, and there was a small bit of drama with getting out of there, due to some issue with our plane, and the fact that it was NYE, so there was not a lot of slack in the system (and/or the ground employees just wanted to get the hell out of there).  After it seemed like we just might not be able to get out of there today, somehow they magically found another plane (or just decided to put us on a somewhat malfunctioning plane after all) and we got out of there only an hour or so delayed.  We had plenty of time in Dallas, so this was not a problem.  Since Dallas is an international hub for AA, they had a "flagship lounge" there; I don't think I've ever been to one of those lounges before, and it was indeed quite a bit nicer t
han the usual AA lounges.  Since it was New Years' Eve, they were plying us with champagne, which didn't hurt.

The flight to Buenos Aires was uneventful, but very long.  It made me call into question my understanding of world geography.  We had a very long layover in Buenos Aires, like 6 to 8 hours, and there was no flagship lounge there :P. We originally booked our AA flight very far in advance, because we were using miles, so I guess that's why the flights lined up terribly.  So we hung out in various places for various periods of time, until our flight finally happened.  The flight was fine, we got to Ushuaia, and amazingly all of our luggage got there too.  There was a crazy long line for a taxi, though it moved reasonably quickly, and we eventually made it to our hotel, the Monaco Hotel (which might sound fancy but is in fact, not).

On the topic of the Monaco Hotel... our room was fine, but very basic.  We even had a view of the water.  John and Clinton's room was facing the hotel dumpsters.  It sounded like their room was substantially less good than ours.  And to add insult to injury, at some point, Clinton (who was, I think, helping us move our bags up to our room) got stuck in an elevator between two floors.  I got the impression this was not at all unusual, and we saw it happen at least once more during our stay.  So we mostly used the stairs (to go to our 5th floor room) for the rest of the trip.

Ushuaia is an interesting town, because people are basically there for one of two reasons... to get on a boat to Antarctica or to backpack through Patagonia.  So, it's an interesting combination of people in the town.  We had a variety of tasty foods (steak, seafood, etc.), we wandered around the waterfront (in torrential downpours), and we went for a hike at Glacier Martial (in a snowstorm).  One cool thing about Ushuaia was that it stays light out until 11 PM or so.  And since we were still on west coast time, we took advantage of that :)

The last day in Ushuaia, we dropped our bags, and then went on an organized tour of Tierra del Fuego National Park.  It was a bit too organized for my liking, as there was a lot of sitting on the bus, and not a ton of time available to wander around the park.  But we had time for short wanders around a few areas of the park.