Day-tripping on Devil Island

LOCATION: 63 in latitude, 56 in longitude and travelling at 10.9 knots.

TO PREFACE THIS ENTRY, I’d like to acknowledge the friends and family of the members of this expedition who have made comments on this site.
Yesterday I read aloud your wishes and thoughts to the group when we collected in the bar for our mid-afternoon briefing. Suffice to say, they were warmly received.


At that time Dan had announced the captain’s decision to postpone the landing on Paulet Island for the high winds that rendered zodiac crossings unsafe. A resilient lot, we swallowed our disappointment - kicking the cocktail hour off a little earlier, flipping through books, studying maps and napping.

The Professor instead coasted close to the island’s bluffs, from which a rich river of stench emanated. An eye-watering, almost-tangible pong.
You know those cute ‘lil Adelie penguins – the archetypical Antarctic penguin in black and white with a distinctive eye-ring? Pass the clothes-peg please.
To be fair, there are more than 80,000 Adelies on Paulet Island, and the wind was blowing directly to the decks where we had stepped out for some fresh air.
It was an olfactory experience to match the visual; in Lynn’s lecture and slideshow the night before we had seen the gory guano stains of blood-red krill in stark contrast against the birds’ bright white breasts.


By breakfast this morning we were preparing to make landfall on Devil Island, a stone’s throw from Vega Island and home to the only colony of Adelies we are likely to encounter on this tour.
Barely waiting for the coffee to cool we fuelled up, wrapped up, packed and made our way to deck where the crew were lowering the zodiacs to the water with cranes. Uttering Russian reassurances the crew were quick to grip our forearms – the seaman’s grip – at the bottom of the gangplank and propel us into the rubber inflatable dinghies.

On Devil Island we…

• Clambered from zodiacs to stand, rocking slightly, on a black-sand beach at the feet of thousands of penguins.
• Climbed one terrace level to an Adelie rookery, continued along a saddle and to the top of a steep cliff to views of Vega Island’s glaciers grinding down to sea.
• Basked in 13 degrees of sunshine and stretched legs unused to more than several paces in one direction.
• Grilled Peter Barrett and Dan Zwartz about the geology of the island, Vega’s retreating glaciers, global warming, and the difference between moraine and the "erratic" scattered rocks. I recorded some of these conversations and observations and hope to later post them as pod-casts so that you too can hear from leading geologists on location on an Antarctic island.
• Heeded Lynn’s advice that "we’re visitors and this is occupied territory", and gave way to unfazed penguins, laughing under our breaths at the bumbling youngsters.
• Passed binoculars around to spy on a floe-load of crab-eater seals. For the record, crab-eater seals eat krill and the misnomer stems from a mistranslation.
• Enjoyed the bliss of island-quiet after the persistent vibration of the ship’s engines.
• Wondered at the three helicopters that punctuated the silence.
  
  
  They landed at a stream’s edge on Vega to offload two people. Dan says they were likely to have come from an Argentinean research station, and noticed their meteorological equipment.

Back on board, our faces tingling from the sun, wind and the thrill of the zodiac ride (its nose lifting high out of the water on a rougher return), we ate lunch hungrily and later gathered for a question-and-answer session with Lynn and Dan. As we discussed things seen and learnt, the most tremendous tabular ‘bergs drifted casually past the portholes.

I’ll leave you now to catch a screening of Herbert Ponting’s film 90 South, shot throughout Scott’s last expedition. It was produced 20 years after the expedition in 1933 and is meant to be beautiful. As we sleep tonight the Professor will cruise through the comparative calm of the Antarctic Channel on its way to Trinity Island off the Peninsula’s eastern flanks.

Until tomorrow,
Stephanie