{"id":246,"date":"2007-11-24T20:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/24\/whales-and-wails\/"},"modified":"2014-11-21T19:01:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T19:01:40","slug":"whales-and-wails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/24\/whales-and-wails\/","title":{"rendered":"Whales and Wails"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a> An Orca Family
<\/em><\/p>\n
Being on a expedition ship in Antarctica is being in a prison of sort. The weather is your warden. You have no control of what you do when. And when there is little or no communication with the \"\"<\/a>outside world, you begin to understand what it is to be locked up in a cell with one phone call per week at $35 for 5 minutes, like here. There\u2019s no place to buy Oreos or a bag of chips, or the latest People magazine, no chocolate on your pillow at night. I never thought I\u2019d miss exercise, sushi with my kids and grand kids and letting the dog out at 5:30 a.m. each day. It’s about being able to eat when you want, what you want and not having to wait for the invitational gong to the dining room. Bar snacks do help beginning at five.<\/p>\n

A lot here depends on one\u2019s camera batteries – are they properly charged so you can get the umteenth picture of a penguin or maybe the family of Orca whales<\/a> which had everyone on deck this morning with giant lenses pointed to 10 o\u2019clock off the bow? Do you have enough gigabits to cover 500 photos in a morning watch? You don\u2019t know if you should waste film when the whales are but a dot on the horizon of your lesser camera, just in case they don\u2019t get closer, or take a chance the captain will steer the ship closer and you\u2019ll have something to write home about. <\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

There are 80,000 Orcas in the Southern Seas. These have a much bigger eye patch than those up the California coast. Orcas are the kings of the jungles, the masters of all. They feed on squid and krill and even know how to grab a giant seal off a floating slice of ice – by splashing him with so much water then jumping on the edge of the ice cube til it tilts, so the seal victim slides off the ice and is at their mercy. Although there was a very new-born calf in the lot we saw this morning (you can tell because the white areas of the Orca markings are yellowish in a newborn) the entire tribe headed straight for our ship – giving photographers great glee – and then swam under the ship and exited the other side. I asked one of the staff why they\u2019d do such a risky thing with a new calf – and he reminded me that the Orcas have no one bigger or better than they are, and ships are no exception. They rule the Southern seas. So we were just another monster to inspect. We, the paparazzi, oogle them like rock stars, maybe they are.<\/p>\n

Yesterday afternoon after the rescue of the Explorer passengers, we plowed speedily through blizzards and ice bergs and wind like I have never experienced in my life to make up for the alteration in our schedule. Finally we made it back to an unusual place called Deception Island<\/a>. It has the form of a volcano because it is a live volcano even under all that ice and water. American and British sealers discovered it and said it had a deceiving donut shape. There is a very narrow entrance to the caldera called Neptune\u2019s Bellows, but that wasn\u2019t daunting to our captain. We went through it anyway in the blinding blizzard of snow and wind. The amazing lava rocks that have dried into giant hills and cliffs were scooped with snow and ice sundae.<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Rusty Whaler’s Bay<\/em><\/div>\n
On the interior shore at Whaler\u2019s Bay, remnants of a whaling station still stand. Huge rust brown oil tanks, odd shaped pipes and containers where whales were killed and their bones and oil extracted for World War II explosives, soap and margarine, and even an air hanger stand like forgotten metal scraps after so many severe winters without care. For years this station functioned as a profitable whaling enterprise but then whale oil became so accessible that there was no more competition and this station folded. Sad to say, 50,000 whales were slaughtered here between 1911 and 1913. Makes you swear off margarine and soap.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Detail of Deception Island. (Click to enlarge in a new window.)
Source: <\/em><\/span>Deception Island Management Group<\/em><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Primarily the “landing” in Deception Island<\/a> was to dip our toes in Antarctic\u2019s frozen water – there is an underground thermal stream of water from the volcano\u2019s geothermal activity. The stream is so narrow, I’m told, my body would cover its width. We had been told to put on our bathing suits and wear unimportant shoes to protect toes for the water can blister. One never knows how hot it could be in your puddle choice. Swimmers still had to wear the usual layers of fuzz and wool and our red Lindblad jackets and water proof pants etc. etc. out of which we were to strip for a second so we could take the toe dip and leap back into our gear. However, as we entered the volcano the winds were of extreme force, and a blinding blizzard surrounded us so the Captain and staff said “no” to the adventure. The landscape was eerie like something out of a black and white Lord of the Rings or m\"\"<\/a>aybe an undiscovered frozen planet.<\/p>\n

Night was once again a constant rolling affair on rough seas as we left the Shetland Islands for Gerlach Straight and the Danco Coast [Graham Land] arriving in time for lunch. (Today we dined on Swedish herring and gavelox and anchovies, even hard-boiled eggs with caviar.) These islands are covered in snow and ice but there is more exposed rock. In the seas, I was awed by icebergs bearing sapphire blue or turquoise stripes and reflections because white reflects all colors and the only colors here are sky blue and sea blue. These bergs have fallen off bigger icebergs to float throughout the sea presenting obstacles to ships such as ours. But our captain showed us a Times Square size berg up close as he steered the Endeavor right through the middle of it <\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Orca Family Being on a expedition ship in Antarctica is being in a prison of sort. The weather is… read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2016,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,27,19,22,13,26,21,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-deception-island","category-gerlache-strait","category-icebergs","category-maps","category-neptunes-bellows","category-orca-whales","category-penguins","category-south-shetland-islands"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/antartica-121.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/audreytaylorgonzalez.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}