It’s a question that we get asked all the time at Swoop: when exactly is the best time to visit Antarctica? The answer of course is that it depends entirely on what it exactly is that you want to get out of your trip: Antarctica is an amazing destination for expedition cruising whether you sail in spring, during the height of the polar summer or when the days shorten into autumn. But personally speaking, I’m a big fan of getting there as early in the season as possible.
Antarctica in the spring is all about the continent waking up after a long, cold and very dark winter.
In those winter months when the sun never reaches above the horizon and Antarctica almost doubles in size and it spreads its great skirt of sea ice. But when spring arrives, the great thaw begins, and the continent feels like it is reborn and open to the outside world again. For me, what could be better than seeing it at its freshest and whitest?
The promise of Spring
This year I was lucky to be on one of the first cruise ships returning to Antarctica to kick off the new season (I sailed on Sylvia Earle, on Swoop’s Antarctic Peninsula Explorer trip). For crew and passengers alike, this was an exciting moment.
The untouched pristine landscape is truly magical. The snow is just so white and so sparkling that it hardly feels real. Late season Antarctica is wonderful of course with its abundance of whales, but in many places on the peninsula you’ll see more penguins on rocky shores as the snow recedes from the beaches.
The snow made the landings we did extraordinary. At Cuverville Bay we hiked up to the ridge of a hill overlooking the bay. In places the snow was half a metre deep. Our guides went ahead of us to create the paths for us, but even with their help you couldn’t help sinking boot-first into the snow with that terrific crunching sound that only really fresh snow can make.
As well as having our own personal highways, the view up the hill gave us great views of the island’s penguin highways. The hillside was braided with dozens of them, beaten down by the waddling of several thousand gentoo penguins to and from their colonies.
Having our own highways meant it was easy to watch the penguins go about their day from a safe distance and not interfere in their important penguin business. If we happened to make a detour into unbroken snow, we were quickly reminded to fill in the snow holes we left behind us. Not for aesthetic reasons, but in case a gentoo fell into a deep footprint and had trouble getting out. Highway assistance, Antarctic-style!
Into the ice
When you’re on the ship, the chance of encountering some lingering pack ice is a lot higher in the early season, which only adds to the sense of being on a proper adventure. On our cruise, the captain and expedition leader were regularly going through Plans A, B and C of the day before settling on Plan D because there had been too much ice for us to sail into a certain bay.
This might initially sound like a problem, but it’s really part of the joys of early season cruising. Itineraries on Antarctic trips are always just serving suggestions, with the weather playing the deciding role. But for this reason, early season is also often a favourite time for the expedition guides. They don’t know what any landing is going to be like, so they get to play at being pioneers and sharing that sense of excitement with their guests. Their enthusiasm is truly infectious!
Our guides had been waiting more than seven months to return to Antarctica, and even for those with over a decade of experience here, the reset button of winter meant that they got to experience everything new again. The paths hadn’t been laid out yet, and there weren’t any footprints in the snow yet. Every landing is fresh, and laying the groundwork for the visitors who’d follow us throughout the rest of the season.
If you’re a photographer, it’s also worth knowing that the light you’ll get travelling to Antarctica is quite unlike anything you’ll experience at other times. The days lengthen as the days stretch out into summer, but in the spring, you’ll still get to shoot in the golden hour. It never gets completely dark, but if you get up early enough – four o’clock in the morning, say – and the clouds are just so, there are some amazing sunrises to be had. Everyone talks about the electric blues of Antarctica’s icebergs, but how about the snow turning into peach and lemon sorbet at dawn? Or the sea turning into beaten gold in an 11pm twilight?
Don’t discount that ice though. From listening to the ship manoeuvre its way through drifting pack to taking a zodiac through jingling brash ice, it never fails to enthral. There were bays full of grounded bergs that we could cruise around, like nature’s own giant art gallery.
Penguins at sea
An art gallery with kinetic sculptures perhaps. I was expecting to see lots of penguins on land, but I hadn’t expected to see so many at sea. This was another advantage of visiting during the Antarctic spring, our onboard ornithologist told me. The penguins were still returning from a winter at sea, so we regularly saw them from the ship as well as during landings, porpoising through the water in large groups.
We even saw them at breakfast. Bleary eyed and still taking in the first coffee of the day, we heard a call go up from one of the window tables, and rushed to see a pod of them just off the ship, swimming and surfing like a group of flying fish. A month later and they would all be nesting where the snow had cleared – and that’s a wonderful thing to see as well of course – but it was exciting to see them at their sleek and elegant best.
And for me, that’s exactly the joy of sailing to Antarctica at this time of year: the thrill of the unexpected. The penguins transformed and the excitement of never knowing what tomorrow might bring.
But always with the joy of new footprints to make in the snow.
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