Half Moon Island lies in the entrance to Moon Bay, between Livingston and Greenwich Islands.  The 2 km long island is crescent-shaped and home to approximately 3,300 breeding pairs of Chinstrap Penguins.  This morning we would be landing there for a few hours of exploring, and mixing with the wild life.  It still amazes me how much life there is in this part of the world.  Mother Nature changes this world with the seasons, and he change is extremely dramatic.  Yet she has evolved creatures that thrive in those changes, and multiply, providing us with an exciting adventure in exploring this world.

Forgive me for resorting to the Internet periodically, but I could never have gotten this shot from the ship.  I think it helps to visualize more if you know that we landed approximately at the mid point, and on the inside of the crescent.

On second thought, it might be a "she".  I was not able to distinguish a difference in appearance between the male and female of this species.  To me they looked identical.  They poses a sense that we do not.  A parent can find it's nest and its chicks in an area containing literally thousands of their species, and I'm sure an avid bird watcher would be able to figure out exactly how they distinguish each other, but to my untrained eye, one Chinstrap penguin looks strikingly like any other.

The climate in Antarctica, besides being very cold most of the year (well, make that ALL of the year, just varied in intensity) it is also very dry, so like a desert, things tend not to deteriorate over very long periods of time.

The island is home to Antarctic Terns, Skuas, Kelp Gulls, Wilson’s Storm-petrels and blue-eyed Shags.   We saw some of each of these, but the Chinstraps definitely were in the majority.

A Chinstrap penguin scurrying to it's nest with a pebble in its beak.

Our landing on Half Moon Island was at 8 in the morning.  We were back on board by 10:30, and ready for lunch.

At 2:00 in the afternoon we’d be going ashore at Whalers’ Bay on Deception Island. Whalers’ Bay is the first bay inside Port Foster as you pass through Neptune’s Bellows at Deception Island.  It was given its name by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot due to the whaling activities undertaken in this bay in the 1900’s.  The site has a flat, cinder beach, which extends approximately 100 m (330 ft) inland before meeting the steep caldera wall.  The buildings include the remains of the Norwegian Aktieselskabet Hektor whaling station and a British Antarctic Survey base, which was evacuated in 1967 during an eruption.  The BAS base, Station B had been a centre for aircraft operations in 1955-57 and 1959-69.

The opening is only 230 meters wide.  It takes you into the caldera of the volcano, which is Port Foster.  The volcano erupted in 1812, 1842, 1907, 1912, 1956, 1967, 1969, and 1970.  In 1923, the water suddenly began boiling in the bay and removed the paint from all the ships is the harbor.  Minor eruptions occurred as recently as 1992.

For the first three decades of the 20th century, Deception Island was used as a major whaling station.  At one time over 3,000 whale carcasses littered the shores, and we saw the bony remnants of this sad history on the beach.
Meteorological and geological research had also been conducted at this site by the British.
 

As I mentioned in Chapter 1 this was our second trip to Antarctica with Quark Expeditions.  In the seven intervening years things had changed regarding what we were allowed to do.  In 2001, at Whalers’ Bay, we did our Antarctic swim in the freezing bay, and followed it with a nice warm pool dug on the shore by the crew.  The water just below the surface was quite hot, to the point of steaming.  It would seep into the pit they dug in the volcanic ash at the water's edge, and it was hot enough to warm our freezing bodies fresh out of the icy cold Antarctic waters.  It was a rite of passage of which not all would partake.  Pete and I did of course, at least in 2001.  This trip, seven years later, we had our senses about us, and decided once was sufficient.  Some of the photos that follow are taken from that trip in December 2001.  I thought it might be interesting to show how things have changed over time.

Snow has been blown into the hangar and formed this drift.  The hangar was actually in pretty good condition, and could easily be cleaned up and used again, but the likelihood of that is remote.
 

And now, for our main interest for visiting Whalers’ Bay, which is to go swimming in the freezing Antarctic waters, briefly of course.  Getting undressed was the hardest part.  We had so many layers of clothing to protect us from the freezing climate.  Taking our clothes OFF was so counter intuitive.  Now remember, this was seven years ago.  We had red fowl weather jackets on that trip.
 

There is an organization, which sets the rules of conduct for tour operators in Antarctica, and I suspect that all cruise companies, Quark Expeditions included, are members.  This organization has decided that digging holes on the beach was not such a great idea, and now prohibits the act.

On this trip, those who wished to partake in this rite of passage could either run into the water at Whalers' Bay as we did seven years ago, and then just come out and dry off as quickly as possible and get dressed again, OR, they could jump off the gangway of the ship with a rope tethered to their life jacket, so they could be pulled back to the gangway in case they could not make it back on their own.

At the nightly recap of the day’s events, there was no end to the stories that were told, and the staff would not hold back on the humorous details.

This pretty much concludes Chapter 10.  In the final chapter I will tell about our return to Ushuaia via Drake Passage.  I must apologize for taking so long in getting back to writing this tale.  One thing you may notice, is that the chapter number has advanced by one.  The reason for this is that chapter 5 was too large, so I split it into two parts, numbering them Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.  So, I had to renumber chapters 6, 7 & 8 to chapters 7, 8 & 9.  Hence, this chapter, which you may have expected to be Chapter 9 is Chapter 10.

One more thing.  I must make a CORRECTION to one of the numbers in the last chapter.  My good friend Dave Davies, who is a brilliant guy, noticed that I had made a miscalculation.  In the beginning of the chapter there was a page with this heading:


and one of the items was 

In the source there was just the figure for km³, but only an empty pair of parentheses for mi³, so I decided to do the calculation myself, and I blew it.  Dave caught it, and was kind enough to let me know.  The figure of 18.64 million mi³ above is actually only 7.2 million mi³.  It was late, and I was tired.  LOL

Hopefully the final chapter will be forthcoming in less time that what elapsed between this chapter and the previous one.

Note from Pete: This WAS the final chapter from Ron!