Today's adjectives: Awesome and historical. And more sensory overload than any of us might have imagined.
It began early, with our mellifluous, 5:00am wake-up call and a special, pre-breakfast visit to Pleneau Island for nesting gentoo penguins, blue-eyed shags, and south polar skuas. Totally unexpected was the juvenile emperor penguin lounging on Pleneau's cobble beach, which was truly a remarkable surprise. Emperors are a rarity because they breed during the frigid austral winter and, at this time of year, both adults and newly fledged birds are widely scattered at sea.
After breakfast, we notched up to another level of exhilaration, as Caledonian Star made another pioneering visit to Booth Island. This is where the pre-eminent French explorer Jean Baptiste Charcot overwintered in 1904. We saw artifacts from that expedition (including Charcot's stone magnetic hut) and were thrilled by this site's spectacular wildlife and scenery.
And on top of these wonders, there was the further excitement of finding all three Pygoscelid penguins - Adelie, chinstrap, and gentoo - nesting here. There are only a few locations where this occurs, a very short list now augmented by our historic visit.
Importantly, this new discovery added extremely valuable information to the Antarctic Site Inventory, a project working closely this season with Caledonian Star and Lindblad Expeditions. The Inventory is an assessment and monitoring study that has been regularly censusing Antarctic Peninsula fauna and flora since 1994. The baseline data and information collected and generated by this project are intended to ensure that any potential, environmental disruptions to Peninsula wildlife are substantially minimized, if not avoided altogether.
