Swimming in Antarctica

Deception Island - we were going inside a volcano through Neptune's Bellows (great name eh?). The island is actually the caldera of an active volcano, so you only see the very top of the volcano. It is also, interestingly, one of the safest harbours in all of Antarctica (hard to believe when it is an active volcano). Anyways, the history of Deception Island has kinda three stages - whaling, science and tourism. The whaling history is clearly evident where we were landing - Whaler's Bay. I think one of the things that I noticed most was that the landscape had changed colour. It was no longer white, but more grey and black. 

As it is an active volcano, there are places where geothermally heated water is oozing out of the black sand, creating steam. I really had to laugh at the chinstrap penguins that were wandering along the beach. Our ornithologist told us that these would be the "teenage penguins", they are too young to need to be at the nesting grounds, so they hang out in interesting places.

As we walked down the black sand beach, a Weddell seal took only brief notice of us before going back to lazing in the sand.

From the beach we took a path up to Neptune's Window where you could look out from the caldera to towards the continent. Deiter and Johanne took in the views.

The path was rather interesting and a little tough to make our way up, made even more difficult because of our rubber boots. I definitely ended up with a fair bit of sand/dirt/ash, whatever it was, in my boots.

Ben, Kyle and Brent

From Neptune's Window, we headed back to the beach where the steam had increased.

Brent and Ben, in there somewhere

And then it was time. Time for the plunge. The polar plunge. We had planned on going all together, but Brent was impatient and went before some of us were even off the ship. So Ben, Cat and I went together. 2 of us wore swim suits, 1 didn't. Now, as I was explaining earlier, there is warm water oozing out of the land. So when you first hit the water, it's warm. It was about another step after this next picture that the cold water hit. And man did it hit hard. On top of that the land kinda falls away about 2 steps from this spot and if you aren't ready for it (which I wasn't), you make a very ungraceful entry into the very cold water (some were more graceful and kinda dove in, I just face planted). Definitely ended up with a mouthful of salty, cold Antarctic water. Blech. And by the way, between the cold and the mouthful of salt water, it is a little hard to breath.

Ben, Me and Cat

When your head makes it back out of the water, you kinda just go into survival mode and try to get back to shore as quickly as possible. And then at some point your body realizes it is fine and you get the big smile, and laughs, and screams.

Once on shore, Kirsten was there to greet you with a towel. But I quickly realised that there was warm water back where we had just come from. So instead of taking a towel, Cat and I returned to laze in the warm water (don't have any pictures). Eventually we got out and headed to Kirsten and her towels and stood watching a total of 97 of the 130 passengers complete the polar plunge. The ship's doctor made sure to take readings of the temperature of the water, and we were informed that it was 1 degree celsius,  2 degrees above freezing for salt water. Not bad. Polar plunge complete.

I just had to put this next photo in. When Michelle swam back, I have to say, she was the only one who didn't looked panicked, she still looked like a swimmer. And makes it look like it's no big deal.

After getting back to the ship, we were off again, leaving the caldera and heading through Neptune's Bellows again. This is what the one side of the bellows looks like.

As we headed towards our final landing, we had an awesome sighting of orcas. Different than the orcas I am used to, but awesome.

We have all been focusing on taking as much in as possible and its super sad to think that it's almost over.