This will be my last entry on this blog since I am now back to reality here in League City.  I have put a few landscapes and ice photos on my website (http://dempseyphotos.com/p87070021).  For now I am working on a formal album to torment visitors to our house.  Animals will come later as I work through my backlog of photos. 

Thanks for participating in my therapy for the past 2 months.  It was the adventure of a lifetime.   If you want a long or short story, I have a million to suit your interest level.  Just let me know.

Bob

Sorry to drop off the face of the earth for a week.  Getting back to reality is a real drag!  I will be posting my photographs to my website (www.dempseyphotos.com) in about 2 weeks.  After that I will discontinue the blog and relax.  Here are a few fun pictures from our expedition. 

The advantage of sailing with a small crew is that you can set your own schedule and do things in groups of 1 instead of 100 like the cruise ships offer.  One thing you can do if you are a little daring is sledding.  Here is a photo of one of our crew tearing down a mountain.  What you can't see from the photo is the end of his ride, which came to a crash in the vast penquin peeing grounds.  He had it coming.

I decided to be the photographer for this, not because the end of the ride looked a bit dodgy, but because you had to carry your sled up to the top of the very steep hill.

Another crazy thing you can do is take a dip in the ocean, where the temperature can actually be below the normal freezing temperature of fresh water.  Here is Kris taking the plunge.  Another activity I opted out of:

Finally, no blog entry would be complete without an iceberg.  This one lingered around our anchorage and necessitated a night anchor watch rotation.  Being up, alone on the deck under a crystal clear sky at 2:00AM was almost worth the cost of the trip by itself.

Calm Water and Whales

Well, I told you we saw whales and could prove it.  Here we are motoring through dead calm waters in the narrow passageways between islands.  The water was perfectly reflecting the mountains and glaciers as we passed on this easy leg of the journey. 

As we entered into a wider bay we were visited by this little guy.  He is a humpback whale, I am guessing about 40 feet long.  He came right up to our boat and circled us for about 15 minutes.  Sometimes he came up within 8 feet of the boat and just looked at us.  He also did some passes under the boat and rolled over as he went beneath us. 

Here he is giving us the 'fish eye'.  Even our seasoned skipper and mate were amazed.  This is an encounter you can't get on a cruise ship (although I believe they have flush toilets and running water).

When I process my photos I will have more shots on my website.  In all, we saw whales about half of the days we were sailing in Antarctica.

Penguins Ahead

Everyone loves the penguins.  I fear that if speak ill of them in any way, I will be put off the boat.  True, they are adorable - - - - upwind.  Downwind adorability is quite another thing.  A penguin is a machine that eats krill, removes all the krill matter that doesn’t stink, then deposits the product on the eternally preserved Antarctica landscape.  On a warm day it positively steams off the snow and displaces every breathable molecule of air.  A penguin colony can be spotted miles away by the pinkish cast of the snow.   

They have no fear of people.  Clearly they do not know what I do.  If you sit still, you will have a visitor walk up to you every few minutes to check you out.  If we were allowed to approach them, I would give one my little camera and see if he actually photographs humans.  It only seems fair.

Penguin chicks are ungrateful little bastards.  Their parents run daily gauntlets of leopard seals to bring them back food.  If the parent doe not have enough the new fledgling will chase it around the colony and mercilessly grab its parents beak to be fed.   By the time they have fledged (?) they are easily as large as their parents.  Watching one of the bloated kids sucking food from its mothers stomach just seems unfair.  But of course, they are adorable.

And, of course, if you misbehave in the penguin colony you will be sent to 'time out'!

Icebergs Ahead!

Icebergs are living things.  They don't just sit inertly in the water waiting for the Titantic.  They are constantly being eroded by water below the surface and wind, rain and snow above the surface.  This means that its size and geometry is constantlty changing.  At some point, the center of gravity moves enough that the iceberg rolls and shoots up out of the water.  That is why is it is not such a good idea to tie your boat to one longer than necessary to obtain your glacier ice for the evening drinks.

Don't believe me?  Here are 2 photographs taken 20 seconds apart.  We were returning to the boat in the Zodiac when we started to see movement next to our anchored boat.  In the 20 seconds between these 2 exposures the iceberg rose 10 feet out of the water and dropped a 200 pound chunck of ice (see upper right of second image) near our boat.  Our captain was on the boat to conduct the panic.

These things are awesome.  We could watch them all day and night.  I will select a few of the more interesting icebergs for the next entry.

During the Drake Passage crossing I intended to take a wide angle photo from the stern of the boat that would capture the boat rising and breaking the swells in the heavy seas.  That picture would have been awesome.  Two things prevented me from getting that shot for you.  The first was the technical issue of getting salt spray on my camera and the difficulty of low light in the overcast skies.  The second was that it was wicked scarey and cold.  So it was difficult for me to get the shot while I was curled up in the fetal position crying like a little girl (well, in fairness to me I was not quite that bad).

A pretty calm moment:

So here is an even more horrible story that I may have alluded to along the way.

On the second day of the crossing, one of the crew blocked up the only toilet on the boat.  The captain punished us with an alternative to bathrooms, which he refers to as “the outside toilet”.  The concept is that you lash yourself to a suitable fixture on the boat then lean or squat over the stern deck platform (about 6 inches above the sea) and enjoy the fresh 0 degrees C air as you do your business.  To demonstrate that this is perfectly possible, he availed himself of the facility on the night watch and stepped down on the stern platform.  The rest he recounted to his first mate in a quiet and solemn tone and she subsequently passed on to us with a bit of a lighter take. 

Being that a number 2 was required, he pulled down his pants to the knees and then stepped back to the edge and squatted.  During the actual physical motions, so to speak, the only rogue wave of the night washed the entire platform.  One can only imagine the shock to the system as such a wave washes over you at 2:00AM.  Nevertheless, he ensured that we all had the opportunity before the toilet could be repaired.  Of course at a early point, the crew revolted and insisted that a bucket be provided in the head and then carried out to the stern for disposal.  This is a bit demeaning, but preferable to the Southern Ocean b’day concept recommended by management.  Initially the process of carrying out a bucket of stuff out to the deck was a bit embarrassing.  After a day or two, we comfortably passed the bucket to the person on watch for handling.  No digestive secrets on this boat.   Still, for 9 people that soon got old.  After about a week, we found a calm harbor where Grant was able to redo the entire plumbing system.  He was our hero for a few hours! 

Search for the culprit that blocked the toilet in the first place continues.

We made it back to Houston yesterday at 7:00AM.  Now that I have spell checkers, a computer and a flat stable surface I will try to fill in the details and prove that we actually did this.  Right now, I don't entirely believe it.  So, let's start with the boat:

This is my first mate, June, starting to layer up for the journey.  Actually, the weather as we depart from Ushuaia was cool and calm.  Hard to get great pictures from a boat that you are on, so I will give you a link here to the Spirit of Sydney website, www.spiritofsydney.net, in for more details. 

And here is a photo of Pascal, our actual boat first mate, organizing the sails as we depart for the Beagle Channel.  In the foreground, with dreadlocks, is Kris, an amazingly enthusiastic and optimistic young man from Martha's River, Australia.  Grant, our captain, has his back to us and the third man in the cockpit is Doug, a 59 year old Aussie from Melbourne.

And here is Jess, our Aussie emergency room nurse, who is demonstrating the 'survival suit'.  Apparently if you have 15 minutes to suit up, this doubles your chance of surviving a fall overboard in the Southern Ocean from 1 percent to 2 percent.  Poor Jess, the Drake Passage was not kind to her.  Her head is in a bucket for most of our pictures of her over the next 5 days.  I will spare you those photos. 

First anchorage, all is calm and perfect in the world: