HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!
Today, we are stopping at Enterprise Island and Wilhelmina Bay. There is no landing for today, there is only scenic activities in the water around this area. It is known for having been a weather protected location where whaling boats came to process the whales.
We slept in a little this morning because our first activity is a submarine ride at 10:30 AM. We did not need to be there until 10:00 AM to be taken out to the submarines on a Zodiac boat.
Early Morning View From Our Window
I was up at about 6:00 AM anyway and it was a beautiful approach to the area. Once again, it was daylight at around 4:00 AM. There were lots of icebergs and smaller ice pieces floating in the water. I opened our large window so I could see out better and take pictures. It was completely calm and eerily quiet, with some light snowfall.
There were penguins occasionally swimming in the water, and I could hear whales coming to the surface and blowing out their air and making a low pitched noise.
Iceberg Near The Octantis
There were also seals and penguins sitting on some of the larger icebergs. It was hard to find the whales that I was hearing because of the amount of ice floating in the water. I finally located them but they were way to far away for picture’s.
We arrived at the place we were going to stay for the day at about 7:00 AM. I went up for breakfast and let Stephanie continue to sleep in since we did not need to be anywhere until much later this morning. There were a coupe of very large icebergs near to where we were parking for the day and they were pretty spectacular, one had large diagonal stripes on it.
Whales By The Zodiacs
We watched everyone going out for their tours from our window. It briefly got a little windier and more snowy, and we were hoping that we would not get our sub ride cancelled. However, the wind almost completely died down by about 9:30 AM. Later in the morning, there were whales starting to show up everywhere around us.
They were easy to spot from our room this high up on the ship, and many of the Zodiacs headed over to the whales, also making finding them easy, just look where all of the boats were. There also was a sailboat that came out of one of the inlets, and also some type of research vessel. When the research ship passed behind the iceberg near our bow, you really got a perspective of how just how large the iceberg was.
For the sub ride, we got dressed up in our normal gear, the same as we would wear on a Zodiac cruise excursion, except we were not wearing the large and heavy waterproof boots.
They were providing non-slip rubber booties for the sub excursion, so we just wore regular shoes down to Deck A where we were to assemble. They gave us rubber booties and a neck strap with our seat assignment number on it. Seating was based on weight distribution. We got seats 1 & 3, which were together. The sub had two sides with seat numbers 1,3,5 and 2,4,6 on each side, and the pilot was in the middle.
Heading Our For Our Sub Ride
We got into the Zodiac to take us for a short ride out to the sub. Our sub was named Paul, and the others in the fleet of 4 are Ringo, John, and George after the Beatles, the subs are bright yellow, so figure it out.
When we got to the sub, we were given some brief instruction by our pilot on how to get from the Zodiac to the sub, and then go down the center hatch to our seats. Seat 3, which was mine, was called first, it was in the center of the three odd numbered sets. Then number 4 boarded, also the middle even seat, and so forth. Stephanie was second to last to board in seat 1.
Chuck Gets To Get On The Sub First
The pilot gave us some emergency instructions on where to find breathing masks, and what to do if he was incapacitated. Then the pilot shut the hatch and pressurized the sub. He also had to give lot of sub status readings to the nearby support boat on oxygen levels, CO levels and battery charges before we could do anything.
Inside The Sub
Then he made the sub just slightly positive buoyancy and we used thrusters to start to submerge. Then we stopped about 25 feet down to make sure the sub would pause, and begin to float up slowly to prove the slight positive buoyancy. This was so that if there was an issue, the sub would slowly rise to the surface by itself.
Our Sub Pilot
After everything checked out we headed down to about 40 meters and came to a vertical wall, extending downward from the shoreline. We stopped there and the pilot turned on the lights and we could see starfish, sun starfish and some sponges. The water clarity was pretty good. The pilot asked us how far we thought we were from the wall and someone said 5 feet. In reality is was about 9 feet, but the glass bubble of the sub magnified everything and made it seem much closer, more like 1-2 feet away.
From there we went down to about 208 feet and found a large whale bone sitting on the seabed/wall that they had found some time ago on another sub dive here, and marked its location with the GPS. We headed a little to the right and found something that our pilot had not seen before. It looked like a large rock or brick and it appeared to be painted yellow and red. He took photos of it and was going to give them to the expedition team to see if they could figure out what it was.
Its Dark Down At 208 Feet
We had been down over our allotted 30 minute timeframe looking at the strange item and it was time to head to the surface. The pilot rotated both sets of seats to face 90 degrees outward from the middle, the normal location that we had not used because everything we were looking at was on one side. Initially, we were only rotated 90 degrees. It took quite a while to surface but we first stopped at about 30 feet and blew some bubbles to mark our spot on the surface so the support Zodiac could locate us.
It was interesting to see the color of the water change as we got closer to the surface, and finally broke the surface.
The hatch was opened and we all got out, one by one, into the Zodiac. It had been a really interesting experience. On the Zodiac ride back to the sub, we stopped at a glacier to see a fur seal that was sleeping on it, and then there was a whale really close by and we headed over to it and got some great photos.
Up Close To A Humpback Whale
It had been a fun excursions and nice to get some extra wildlife sightings on the way back to the ship.
We headed back to the cabin to change out of our expedition gear and into regular clothes so we could go to lunch.
We headed up to the World Cafe and had lunch there, and then we came back to the cabin to rest and work on the blog and download pictures.
We have another excursion at 2:45 PM, which is a Zodiac Cruise, so we did not do a lot until then.
We put all of our gear back on and headed down to Deck A at 2:45 PM, and waited in line a short time before we boarded our Zodiac. There are 5 people sitting on each side, and we were in spots 3 & 4, so at times picture taking was tough. We saw some whales initially and stopped by them. Our guide is from Ushuaia and she was really great at telling us when the whales would surface. You could see them blowing bubbles to coral the krill they were eating.
Really Close – Too Close For My Zoom Lens
We got some spectacular photos because we were extremely close to the whales, all of which are Humpback whales in this area.
From there, we went to see an old whaling ship that had caught fire in roughly 1920, and had been beached in shallow water to save the whale oil onboard and the crew. There is just a small section of the steel hull remaining above the surface, all of from the bow of the ship.
Old Whaling Boat Sunk During A Fire
We proceeded to another area where there were two wooden boats beached on the shore, these were long boats from some ship in the past that had been abandoned.
There were several areas where seals and penguins were on the snowy shore and we could get really close for pictures. There was also one area where large birds were nesting and we could see their chicks in the nests.
Humpback Whale Fins
We started back toward the ship and saw some more whales nearby and we headed over to them, and once again were quite close for pictures. On lifted its massive side flipper into the air and was slapping the water surface with it.
Our boat driver got called from the bridge because they thought we were too close to the whale, and they said the whale was irritated, thus using the flipper. Our guide said it was a young male practicing for next year’s mating season, where the flapping of the fins is part of the mating ritual. We went with her story.
We headed back to the ship but we could not tie up yet, there were other Zodiacs loading passengers. We went back to the bow of the ship and our guide used everyone’s phone cameras to take group photos of our Zodiac group with the ship’s bow in the background.
We headed back to the unloading area on the side of the ship and boarded. It had been a great Zodiac Cruise, we really got to see a lot.
We were done with expedition excursions for the day, so we decided to get out of our gear and just relax in the cabin for a while. Of course, this gives me a chance to catch up on the blog post before I loose track of what we experience each day.
We headed to the Explorer’s Lounge for some glasses of wine and to watch the departure at 6:00 PM. There were still a tremendous number of whales in the area and some were pretty close to the ship as we transited to the next destination for tomorrow.
More Whales…..
There were several icebergs floating in the area as we were cruising, and many of them had seals and/or penguins on them, sort of a floating hotel for the wildlife.
We had to sort of force ourselves to go to dinner, it was almost 8:00 PM, and the World Cafe only serves dinner until 8:30 PM. There was just so much to see, but we also needed to eat. We had dinner there and then headed back to the Explorer’s Lounge for a nightcap and to visit with many of the people we see there each night..
We have an 8:00 AM excursion tomorrow, so we did not need to stay out late knowing we had to get up early and get ready for that. We headed back to the room about 10:30 PM, it had been a great day.