Deception Island

We went to Deception Island today. It is in the South Shetland Islands. It is a beautiful, beautiful island. The island is shaped almost like a circle, with a small entrance point. The entrance point is called Neptune’s Bellows. If asked, I don’t think I could possibly choose any particular highlight of this adventure but if I was pressured I would have to say Deception Island would come close.

We made two landings today. The landscape was very barren looking. I think some of the photos even look black and white. We walked along the beach in the morning and the hiked up to a lookout spot. It was Neptune’s Window. It was so, so beautiful. From here you could see both sides of the island – beach on one side and ragged coastline on the other side. There were no penguins but lots of fur seals. The remains of a shipwreck were also evident on the beach here. It made for some fantastic photos – a lonely, desolate reminder of another time. I figure we could make up some pretty great stories with some of the lanscape photos we took. Amy, Jeff and I hung out. Jeff wrote Antarctica in the sand and we took photos. When we got back to our landing spot and caught up with the rest of our group someone wrote ‘Antarctica 2012’ in an old shipping vessel and we took some photos again with all of us there. The rest of the group had explored some abandoned buildings, an airplane hanger, an oil tanker & burner left over from the whaling, sealing or science industry.

The second landing, which was still before lunch was amazing. It was Telephon Bay. We hiked up a volcano to the edge of a crater – so much fun. The entire island was all black lava rocks. We hiked around for about an hour, it was all volcanic ash and looked like black sand but there wasn’t any soil here. It was easier then hiking on sand but it felt a little like sand. It was really neat – I ran down the hill. Shocker, I know! We had some fun and took some great jumping photos. We walked along the beach to head back, it was so peaceful.

There were a couple of penguins on the island but only one or two. It took us a while to get back to the boat as the Zodiacs couldn’t get in to pick us up because the water had become so rough. We just waited on the beach for a short time. The Zodiac ride on the return trip was an experience as we were crashing over waves and just about everyone got wet.

We should have known then what was in store for us but we were having such a great time that we weren’t thinking about the fact that we had to cross the Drake Passage to return. We left shortly after lunch and it contunued to get rough. We were leaving about 7 hours early because the captain was worried about the weather and he thought we might avoid the worst of it by heading out sooner.