The waves and wind are diminishing but it is still a rough sea. We are encourage to go up on the bridge so we took advantage of that. The captain showed us a storm system on the radar and indicated the winds were pushing us away from it and towards Antarctica. So we may arrive in the Shetland Islands much earlier that expected.
We spotted our first big iceberg this morning, the second iceberg was like a huge table top only it was a mile long and about 1/4 mile wide. They called it a tabular iceberg. A humpback whale breeched near the ship and penguins have been spotted swimming and jumping in the waters.
Since we arrive early near King George Island, we received our instructions for going ashore. We have a special way of boarding the Zodiacs and going ashore. They divide the group into 4 teams and will split cruising and landing excursions among the teams.
While cruising in the Zodiac we watched thousands of penguins and a few large, lazy elephant seals, and enjoyed the quiet stillness of the waters and the majesty of the snow covered mountains and shorelines. On shore we walked among the gentoo and chinstrap penguins, marveled at the size of the seals and enjoyed walking around. All of a sudden we heard a huge clap of thunder under clear blue skies. It wasn’t thunder, it was a glacier calving off an iceberg! Exciting!
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