Sailing and South Georgia Island

After leaving the Antarctica Peninsula area, the ship turned towards South Georgia Island. It was the plan to sail around it a bit and hopefully get into one or two fjords, as we had some extra time before we needed to arrive at King Edward Point, and the little settlement of Grytviken, a very historical place, which I'll describe a bit more in my next post.

The weather, while sunny most of the day, was very cold and extremely windy. In the afternoon, as we approached the island, the wind speed was in the 60-80 knot range and it was difficult to walk out on deck, let alone be on deck. Captain came on over the PA system to suggest we come inside, and if we insisted on staying out, to exercise common sense and caution. I stayed outside long enough to learn how to walk in these kinds of winds - basically at a 90 degree angle, and to hold on to handrails for dear life! I did get some pictures and that was about it.

Later we passed by a beach area where a rookery of penguins could be seen.

It was way to windy and dangerous to get into a fjord, as the winds in there were still quite high - 50 knots - so the captain slowly and carefully turned the ship around and we headed back out to sea and on towards our port stop for the next morning at Grytviken.

We also passed by and turned around by an iceberg with a very unique shape. It was so pretty!