So, It’s Christmas Day…Merry Christmas everyone.
It was approx midnight when we got to bed last night. With the little wifi we could get, we were trying to update the blog and send Christmas messages. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog, that we were paying US$25 to get the Gold wifi package. That’s $25 per day, for the rest of the voyage, and it’s only as good as the available signal, and limited by the number of users. !! It’s also for just one device. We are attempting to share through bluetooth.
By 4am we were wide awake again. Jen and I swapped Christmas gifts and discussed what our respective children and families are doing.
Overnight the ship set coarse for Deception Island in the Southern Shetlands. This is an amazing island with an incredible past. First up, it’s a volcanic caldera, in the shape of an atol, but surrounded by high mountains, making it a perfect haven for ships in the tempestuous South Atlantic.
Deception Island. Some history.
Entrance to harbour. Neptunes Bellows
What the first discovers found, it was also occupied by thousands of seals. Between 1819 and 1825 a frenzy of seal slaughter followed, which soon saw the seals depleted. Then whaling was undertaken, first by Norwegians in 1906. Whales were flensed at the foreshore in the bay, known as Whalers bay, before factory ships allowed the more efficient reduction of the whole carcass. Whaling declined dramatically in 1931 when the whale oil price collapsed. No doubt the Great Depression of the late ’20’s played a part in that along with greater electrification. Whaling operations diminished to the 1960’s, though some continued into the ’70’s. There were three interested whaling operations.
Commercial use of the island ceased when the caldera erupted in both 1967 & 1969, damaging or destroying, processing equipment and infrastructure.
Visiting the shore
I decide to take the long lens Canon on this trip and tuck it into my jacket to protect it from sea spray and cold. However, the I attempted to use it, found I had left the memory card in the computer!!! Fortunately I had taken some photos of the decaying infrastructure, from the ship, on arrival in the harbour, Foster Harbour. I did also pack the GoPro so will have some pictorial footage to be edited later on.
Since, equipment and an aircraft hanger, are rotting away but there is a new interest, tourism. We go ashore in a zodiac and observe the destruction from a safe distance. Skeletons of wooden ships, crumbling wooden buildings, whale bone graveyards, metal oil processing and storage tanks.
Whale oil storage tanks.
Chinstrap penguins, the only local inhabitants. Two separate pairs putting on quite a show for us. The sand is black, volcanic emitting steam partially masking the shoreline. There is the small of sulphur.
Thoughts of parallels.
One couldn’t help thinking about the disaster at White Island several years ago, when walking along the shore! For those who had not heard abut it. A tour group in 2019, was visiting a disused sulphur extraction operation on White Island, off the east North Island coast of New Zealand, when it erupted. Killing 22 tourists and guides and injuring 25 of the 47 people on the Island at the time.
While walking around the rusting hanger, I noticed some discarded tractor tracks. They were possibly the same tracks used by Edmond Hillary’s tractor expedition to the South Pole, Lead by Brit. Vivian Fuchs, in 1958?
After an hour and a half we were back on board the ship, quite happy to be sailing out of the currently peaceful waters, back into the open sea.
Christmas celebrations.
This evening, before dinner, there is another quiz with a Christmas theme, which we didn’t do so well at this time, as two of three section were on movies, actors, songs and singers.
Christmas dinner saw us being much more selective of courses and avoiding overeating. Just as well, as seas are predicted as 4.6m swells during the night.
At the next table, we greatly enjoyed the company of Pirya and Sid, two ethnic Indian Australians who are traveling the world after giving up their professional engineering occupations, to establish a social media presence of their travels. What are we doing wrong?…:) They have a following of 6.95million subscribers. Incredible and YouTube reward them handsomely. I like the sound of that…:)
After, we opt for bed instead of the movie, at 9.30pm.
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