The Winds (and Penguins!) of St. Andrew's Bay

Super fantastic! Mambo sawa sawa! These are the words Doug Cheeseman, founder of the Cheeseman's Ecology Safari, would use to describe today in St. Andrew's Bay. Doug said in the 17 trips they've done using this similar itinerary, today was the best day they've ever had at this spot. And it's hard to imagine how it could have been much better.

It was a "normal" morning, in that we were allowed to sleep until 6:30am before our wake-up call, with the first zodiacs to shore at 8am. We signed up to have lunch on shore, in order to maximize our available time at the landing. The last zodiacs were scheduled to return to the ship at 6:30pm. So that's the potential for 10 ½ hours on shore. This explains why we are so tired!

We landed on one of the first zodiacs, and headed for a King penguin colony near a river running along one side of the landing. The river is actually run-off from a glacier that comes close to the beach on that side of the landing. It was good for a few minutes, then it started to rain. Having learned our lesson the hard way a few days ago that rain and camera equipment do not mix, we pretty quickly packed away our gear and just wandered around for a while. At 10am, by which time the rain had stopped, we met a small group of people along with professional photographers and staff Tom Murphy and Rod Planck for a photography workshop. I thought it would last about an hour. Pretty quickly, the group split into two, with only 3 people (Lori and two others) staying with Tom while Greg went with Rod. The idea was to take a few shots of penguins on the beach and then wander up to the ridge overlooking the King penguin colony which boasts 150,000 breeding pairs. Suffice to say, it was another day of penguin landscapes!

Three hours after we began with Tom, we were still picking his brain for technical, and more importantly, composition tips to improve our photography. Greg was long since done with his workshop, and we finally hooked up around 1pm or so and compared notes. Then we spent maybe half an hour to an hour on the ridge continuing to shoot the penguin landscape. It's hard to describe, but basically, there are penguins everywhere the eye can see, from the ocean beach, where they come crashing in and out of the waves, along the river that runs through that side of the colony as well, and up to the base of the glaciers that run nearly to the ocean. There's a second, larger river that runs from this second glacier to the ocean, and that's where the penguins who are molting stand – for 3-4 weeks – as they wait for their old feathers to fall out and new ones to grow in. During this time, they can't go into the ocean, which means they don't eat, since all their food lives there. Some of the young birds going through their first molt are covered in long brown fur – they call them kiwis since that's kind of what they look like! Anyway, the mixture of colors, from the brown kiwis (or okum boys) to the regal black and white with their yellow or orange highlights on their neck and the top of the chest, make for some interesting and colorful patterns to shoot.

However, by 2pm or so, the winds started howling off the mountains behind us. We haven't said so before, but a few years ago, at this landing, the winds started howling very quickly – from 0 to 100mph in a split second, and the landing had to be evacuated. It turned out that some were too slow to get back to the landing, by which time it was too dangerous to return the zodiacs to the ship. So 28 people wound up taking the remaining zodiacs across the rivers I talked about earlier (they were suddenly too deep and fast to cross on foot) to a research hut maybe a quarter mile away (we could see it from the landing). There they were stuck for about 11 hours. This was not a scenario we wished to repeat! So when the winds started up today, we heard they may be calling for an evacuation and they were asking people to return from the ridge to the landing site just in case. We took a few more photos, just about got blown over in the very strong winds, and then decided to head for the landing. We figured at worst, we would get some lunch and return.

Once we got to the beach, we did indeed have lunch, and the winds died down a bit. So we decided to attend a second photography workshop with Tom Murphy, and made our way back over to the ridge overlooking the main colony again. Once that workshop ended maybe 2 hours later, we stayed on the ridge another hour before making our way back to the landing and back to the ship. After a quick lukewarm shower for Lori (it was hot for Greg!) we headed for dinner and now are dumping our camera memory cards and generally preparing for tomorrow.

And what a day we expect! It's to be another early landing, with breakfast starting at 4:30, the first zodiacs to shore starting at 5:30, and the opportunity to remain onshore until 7pm. Yes, that's a 13 ½ hour landing – the Cheeseman's have a reputation for getting people onto shore more hours than any other company out there. Here again, it's hard to imagine otherwise.

So for now, it's good night, and we'll have to go through photos to upload more when we are at sea in another 2 days or so as we are, once again, exhausted!