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.
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