40 Below: An Antarctic Birthday Quest #9 (What I came here for)

Monday March 13

Paradise Bay and Neko Harbor

When you dream of a place, and you dream it in the fullest form you can imagine - with the most beautiful light, color, features, surroundings, and conditions your mind can muster based on research, images from others, and then your own creative touches, your own subconscious details.

In Paradise Bay, I awoke to something more beautiful than I could ever have imagined. Only the pictures can point the right direction. To be treated to views like that first thing in the morning, over a hot cup of coffee, wrapped in warm clothes, standing in quiet and soaking it all in, is a mental ebenezer I have built in my mind to be able go back to whenever I want/need to. And then, I knew it was calm enough togo out kayaking. The water was almost glass. So after that quiet moment, I could feel my heart begin to rise as I knew that I would be out there, on the water, in the ice, in just a short time. I couldn’t WAIT to get out there.

So I layered up, donned my dry suit, and then got aboard to go out to the middle of the bay and begin our paddle. I could have stayed out the entire day. If I had been able to keep the feeling in my toes for more than an hour, I’m sure I could have convinced Prune to make a real break for it and given the guides a run for their money trying to wrangle us in.

It was an absolutely spectacular morning. Blue skies, shifting clouds, diffused and direct sunlight at various points, the quiet click and pop of glacier ice melting all around us, calving glaciers booming every so often, and astounding natural beauty in more forms than I can count. I will cherish my memory of that morning for the rest of my life. 

When we kayak, we often get to be out first, and we often get to come in last. So we had a long time out on the water, and although I was freezing, I was flying very high when I came back. Saddened only by the knowledge that it was over. I warmed up, regained feeling in my toes, ate lunch and enjoyed trading superlatives and exclamations with fellow passengers. It seems as though everyone felt similarly about what they had just seen and while we were all elated, there was a quiet reverence to our reflections as well. The weight of the beauty we had just witnessed had clearly affected everyone.

We moved on to our location for that afternoon, a short and stunningly beautiful cruise away down an entirely glaciated and iceberg-laden passage that the boat expertly navigated. I didn’t eat lunch with anyone that day, I just sat in my seat by the window alone and stared out the window as the scenery passed by, trying to stop myself from taking even more pictures of ice.

I did a workout after lunch as they were setting up for the next operations and I saw a humpback whale family feeding out the window as I ran. I listened to some of my favorite songs in the whole world, and I drifted further and further down a river of gratitude and memory and into places I knew this trip would take me. It was a really special interval.

And then, as if the day could have gotten better, we all geared up again for our afternoon outing, the first time we’ve done two expeditions in a day since South Georgia. You can only land up to 100 people at a time on Antarctica so we generally split the passengers up and half do a zodiac cruise and the other half do the landing and we trade off. I was really tired from the morning and so I opted for a shorter zodiac cruise and a quick landing. Some of my favorite people aboard, (Gooseberry and Rutabaga among them) also opted for the same thing.

We started out in full sunshine and within 10 minutes of being on the boat we had maybe 100 feet of visibility. Large, fluffy flakes of snow were blowing horizontal and my favorite zodiac driver, Lingonberry, is at the helm. This is very normal for Antarctica he says, but we were on a mission to find the humpback whales just spotted by another boat already out cruising. We went around an iceberg and found two sleeping crabeater seals on an iceberg. It’s funny to see an animal lying so content and peaceful in the middle of a whiteout snowstorm with conditions worsening, completely unaffected by a seemingly significant environmental factor.

We pressed further into the snow. We could no longer see the boats or anything that wasn’t really close to us. Then Ligonberry, married to a whale specialist who is also on our boat, spotted the “footprint” of the whales at the surface which is a ring of water that contains mucus, oils and other runoff from the whales breathing and resting underwater. It was very close to our boat and sure enough in less than one minute three humpback whales surfaced within 50 feet of our boat. Several other zodiacs were closeby as well to spot them. They stayed at the surface, feeding, breathing, resting, for a few minutes while we gawked and tried our best to get good photos. Then they dove down again. We tried to guess where they might come up nex and again, we were very close to them when they surfaced near an iceberg and started swimming parallel to our boat with one big ice chunk in-between us. Visibility was still very low, but we rounded the corner of the iceberg and saw that the whales had turned and were swimming straight for our boat. Lingonberry actually had to reverse the boat so as not to run into them. They came within about 15 feet of us, and then dove directly under our boats. We could see every bump on their heads, their mouths and eyes, and when their flukes were the only thing above the surface, we could see every detail of the outline and the sheer size of these things. The tail alone was 8 feet wide, massive to look at up close.

This amazingly, happened yet again with a different set of whales in the area, only they came from the side. The snow and ice were still blowing horizontally so it was hard to keep our eyes open in the wind, but we couldn’t miss being so close to these giants of the deep. It was incredible, a sighting beyond anything I could have hoped for.

Everyone was awestruck and so the landing, still in whiteout conditions, felt lackluster. However, Lingonberry, as he was dropping us off for our time on land, and waiting for a clear path through the brash ice, started ramming into icebergs for fun. He was trying to park the zodiac in troughs that waves had made in some of the icebergs as well. Rutabaga asked him if he was just bored at this point. Lingonberry is the absolute best.

I walked around the penguin colony and up to the really amazing view of the nearby glacier and could barely see It for all the snow, and then, just like that, the snow stopped and the sun came out again. I got to see a big chunk of ice calve into the bay and hear that amazing thunder again, and I decided I should go back to the ship to warm up because truly, nothing else better than what I had just seen could happen. We all spent the rest of the night trading whale sighting stories, and fighting over who was closer, who saw it from the best angle, comparing photos and videos, and talking about how amazing it all was.