It was in the last few days of our Antarctic Peninsula cruise that our Expedition Leader Ashley brought something special to our attention. We were in the lecture lounge listening to her present her round up of the day’s activities and what tomorrow’s plan would bring when a map flashed up on the screen. By this stage of the voyage we had become armchair experts in reading maps of wind speeds and wave heights, but this one was something new.
On the screen was a single ship icon sat in the Bransfield Strait, somewhere between the long arm of the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands. As the map zoomed out, the ship remained resolutely on its own. It took a while for its meaning to sink in, but an excited buzz swept around the lounge when the penny dropped, turning into a round of applause when Ashely made the formal announcement: we were the last expedition cruise ship in Antarctica.
Why travel so late?
My previous Antarctic voyage had been in the early season, a mid-November trip when the days were still lengthening into nearly 24 unbroken hours of daylight. Truth be told, I always felt this was the best time to experience Antarctica: the snow was at its freshest and deepest, and the penguins at their liveliest, busying themselves getting ready for the arrival of eggs and chicks.
But I was also aware that late season had its cheerleaders. The end of the Antarctic summer has some of the best whale watching on the planet, so I definitely had that look forward to. I booked myself on to the Sylvia Earle expedition cruise ship on Swoop’s Antarctic Peninsula Explorer trip, for the last voyage of the season.
Snow and ice
Travelling so late in the season I had an irrational fear that all of Antarctica’s snow would have gone, melted away after the long summer. So the first thing I was relieved to discover was that yes, there was still plenty of the white stuff. The beaches were bare rock and pebbles rather than being covered in the pristine white of November, but the blacks and chocolate browns of the raw landscape only made the contrast with the glaciers and snow-clad mountains even more dramatic.
We had actually travelled so late in the season that the snow was starting to arrive again. During one landing we were swept up in an unexpected snow storm. As a true Canadian, I’m used to brushing off a snowfall as part of my regular winter routine, but this was a long way from that. As we huddled together in our zodiacs and pushed away from the shore to return to the ship, we could actually see ice forming around us in the water. The sea turned slushy before our eyes, and made a strange grating sound along the side of our boat. Barely an hour later, the slush had turned into pancake ice as far as we could see. It was as if the ship was surrounded by a thousand giant white lily pads. An hour after that, they had started to freeze together into rafts and fields. I felt a visceral connection to the earliest generations of polar explorers, and gave thanks to be sailing in a state of the art vessel. How terrifying the ice must have appeared in a wooden sailing ship.
Sublime sunsets
The biggest difference I experienced travelling to Antarctica in March was literally one of night and day. Even at the end of November, you get daylight pretty much around the clock with perhaps a little bit of dusk around midnight. Now this was replaced by 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. And that meant some absolutely epic sunrises and sunsets.
A typical sunset would go something like this: I’d be in the lounge bar or sitting down to dinner and be deep in conversation with someone and realise that you were losing their attention, or they were losing yours. The chat would dry up as we’d both start to notice that the sky was on fire. After grabbing parka and cameras (we quickly learned to keep both at hand), we’d rush out onto the deck for the show. The light would burn orange and crimson, and after a while you would put down the camera and just enjoy the show because you knew that the camera hasn’t been invented yet to do justice to an Antarctic sunset.
The shorter days also meant that the ship had to maintain a proper nightwatch and navigate a little more slowly at night to make its way safely through the ice. This wasn’t a drawback – it actually connected us again with how people once experienced Antarctica. At the height of the summer season, there are plenty of other ships in the area in constant contact with each other. This time we had the Peninsula effectively to ourselves, so in icy areas where we might have sailed at a faster pace a few months earlier, the Sylvia Earle’s captain and ice pilot instead made sure we followed a more conservative and safer passage, always treating the Antarctic wilderness with the respect it deserves.
Whales galore
Everyday I kept my eyes out for whales. If you visit Antarctica before Christmas, whale sightings tend to be a little thinner on the ground as many of them are still migrating south from their tropical breeding grounds. As the summer goes on, they gather to gorge themselves on the immense swarms of krill that thrive in the polar waters. Visitors to Antarctica at this time commonly have quite close encounters with them, as whales who have grown happily fat after months of feeding indulge their curiosity and swim up to zodiacs and even kayakers.
I was lucky enough to spot humpback whales during more than one zodiac cruise, but ironically the most thrilling encounter was when we were on the ship. We sailed up the Lemaire Channel, one of the most picturesque stretches of water anywhere in Antarctica, only to have to turn around at the end and retrace our steps in the face of an incoming weather front. We hadn’t seen a single fluke on our first passage, but when we turned around it was as if we were sailing through whale soup.
Spouts and fins were everywhere. There were 40 or 50 of them, at play or just sleeping at the surface and we very slowly picked our way through the strait. Out on the deck, no one dared speak. Instead we listened to them trumpeting (there’s no other word for it), to the sound of their explosive breaths or the waves surges as they lunge fed at the surface. It was an extraordinary scene, and something I imagined you might have seen a century ago before the industrial whalers arrived, not now in the 21st century.
A few days later, when a weather window allowed us to dash up to Elephant Island, we encountered a similarly large group of fin whales. One of our guides told us that even a few years ago this would have been an unimaginable scene, but that fin whales are now returning in increasing numbers to their ancestral feeding grounds, having finally begun to recover from the predations of the whaling industry.
The last ship
On the penultimate day of our trip, before we began to think about pointing our bow northwest to head back across the Drake Passage to South America and home, we had our final landing at Half Moon Island. A group of kayakers from the ship took their final paddle and then played Rock Paper Scissors to decide who would get to be the last person out of the water and Antarctica’s final kayaker of the 2023/24 season.
I held back on the shore and got in the last zodiac returning to the ship. As I climbed on board, I looked down to where my boot had left the faintest of impressions in the pebbles. It would be at least another seven months and probably more until anyone else would step foot on that land. The chinstrap penguins hopping about the rocks didn’t seem too fussed, however much I looked at them for some sort of acknowledgement. We were only brief visitors in their home after all. And as we pulled away and headed back to the ship, the ice froze behind us again – but this time for good.
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