Penquins

During one of the talks on our cruise given while crossing the Drake Passage, the Penguins we were expected to see were covered.

These included the 3 species included in the genus Pygoscelis commonly known as the Brush-tailed Penguins. The 3 included; Adélie - Pygoscelis adeliae, Gentoo - Pygoscelis papua and Chinstrap - Pygoscelis antarctica.
The diet of these penguins is mainly krill along with small fish and squid. All three types makes nests of small stones to keep their eggs and young dry and the female lays 2 eggs. We saw quite a bit of stone stealing going on. We were surprised at the variation in size of the chicks we saw within each colony.

 Adélie: These are the smallest of the Brush tailed group and found breeding the most southerly. These are the ones we first saw and my favorite.

 Alternative form of land transportation.

I'm imposing grander thoughts on this guy than is probably correct.

Penguin exiting the water, they pop out like Champagne corks.

Here is a "Waddle" of Penguins heading up to their Colony or Rookery off in the distance.

Another group heading back to the sea for food.

Gentoo: These are the third largest of the Penguins after the King and Emperor. As we traveled more north we started seeing these guys. Distinguished by the white on their heads and a red beak.

 A Penguin highway.

 Off on an adventure.

 British Gentoos at Port Lockroy. The Port Lockroy Base is on Goudier Island (64º49’S, 63º30’W) just off Wiencke Island in the Antarctic Peninsula. The Base is now a museum, gift shop and famous Post Office. It is run by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust by 4 volunteers selected from 5000 applicants. The 4 volunteers stay for 4 months, due to inclement weather they had not been able to land 12 ships during the first half of the 2016 Antarctic summer.

This base is on the Antarctic mainland. Can you guess whose base it is? All the Argentinian huts have giant Argentina flags either on the walls or roof.

We spent a lot of time just watching the interactions at the colonies, very interesting and entertaining. The Expedition staff were always available for questions.

Mothers and chicks

Nice comfy nest of stones.

Nests under the Port Lockroy base.

 Views out from the Port Lockroy base window.

Chinstrap:
These breed further north than the Gentoos, though it appears that the breeding territory of the Gentoos is spreading both south and north. We did not get very far north due to a bad storm hitting the South Shetland Islands, so we stayed in more sheltered waters.

 These guys sound a bit like gulls.

 A breeding colony.

 Large chick in the right third of the photo.

 Some chicks of various sizes here.

 The green on the snow is algae.

 This guy may not be sleeping, We were told Penguins are able to have half their brain sleep at a time. Uni-hemispheric sleep happens in animals when one side of the brain shows waking activity while the other side is asleep.

Emperor Penguin.
The staff did not expect to see these and everyone was surprised. These guys were molting, you can see the feathers on the snow in some of the photos.

From watching the movie,  The March of the Penguins, I know they breed in winter and have just one egg. The movie is worth watching.

Crossing the Antarctic Circle on the Ocean Diamond with Quark Expeditions

We left Ushuaia, Argentina (54.48S 68.18 W) at 6:30PM on Saturday, January 16, 2016 and crossed the Antarctic Circle 66.33 S on Tuesday, January 19 a distance of about 900 miles.

 Ushuaia, Fin del mundo, the End of the World, known as the most southernmost city in the world. Actually we saw a town further south when cruising the Beagle Channel on the Chilean side of the channel, don't know the population but maybe it was not large enough to count.

 View from our room of the dock of the very busy port. It was even more crowded on our return.

Our home for the duration. It was about the same size as the hotel room we had overnight in Ushuaia. There was plenty of storage in the closets across from the bathroom for clothes and rigid suitcases. The bathroom had plenty of shelves and contained storage to keep things from escaping when the ship was swaying.

Argentine side of the Beagle Channel on our journey south to open waters and the dreaded Drake Passage.

 The Ocean Diamond had an Open Bridge Policy, we were all allowed to visit he bridge any time unless the Pilot was guiding the ship to or from Ushuaia. We were surprised at some of the less than modern control panels.

We left the relative calm of the Beagle Channel sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday, January 17. We knew it, felt it and heard it, needless to say didn't get a lot of sleep that night. On the cruise down we had seas with 12 to 15 foot waves and winds of 40 MPH. We both used the patch and neither of us had any symptoms of seasickness.

 Now there was nothing to be seen off the Starboard side (right).

 And nothing off the Port side (left) either. By this time the waves were settling down, but the Drake Passage could not be called the Drake Lake (very calm passage) yet.

 Nothing ahead. It was like this for almost 2 days. On our first 2 days we were kept busy with getting kitted out with our boots and parkas and listening to lectures by marine biologists and having mandatory drills.

 January 18 we saw our first iceberg.

 On Tuesday, January 19 at 7:15 AM we crossed the Antarctic Circle. We had a visit from King Neptune who read a proclamation and was baptizing and tattooing (a rubber stamp of a trident) visitors to his icy realm and then we all toasted with champagne.

The plan was to have entered Marguerite Bay south of Adelaide Island and proceed north through Laubeuf Fjord then through the Gullet and explore on Zodiacs somewhere along the way,

but the bay was iced in.

Instead, our first Zodiac cruise was as close as we could get. It was a windy day and the seas were rough and there was plenty of salty sea spray to go around for everyone.

 Our first seals seen, Crab-eaters, though they don't really eat crabs, they mainly eat krill.

Our first Penguin seen, an Adélie, Pygoscelis adeliae, named by a French Explorer after his wife. No other birds are known to breed further south. Their main food source is also krill, but also eat squid and small fish.

Fair Winds

Beers in the fridge:

Patagonia Weisse, looked like home made lemonade, cloudy. Very refreshing, would help pass away a summer evening in the Estate Garden quite well.


Saw this Toad in the hole on the web

Not sure how to construct it but am putting on my thinking cap.

Fuller's Brewery Tour 2010

While in London for the Eldest's Graduation back in 2010, we had the chance to visit the Fuller's Brewery.

As it turned out we had a personal family tour, the tour guide, John and the 3 of us. The tour guide was an ex-employee.

 Here is the tourguide in his yellow safety vest and our eldest whose back you may recall from other Past Trip posts.

We were first given an overview of the making of beer and then a look at some of the older equipment no longer used. The brewery uses so much water that they draw local water overnight to a huge tank for the next day's beer making, so as not to affect local residents while they are taking their morning showers.

Antique tub for heating the wort.

 Special reserve ales are aged in casks, we bought a few to try.

 There were 2 keg filling lines, one manual and one automatic.
Manual.
The guys fill the kegs, someone pounds in a plug, they stack up the kegs and a guy takes the stack to the warehouse. The guys get coffee breaks, in the old days the workers got beer breaks.

Automatic.
Robot puts empty kegs onto the line, they get filled, it takes them back off after they are filled. It gets no coffee break. The kegs take the conveyor belt at bottom left, go to the background of the photo and through the machine that cleans, fills and plugs the keg.

You can make out the orange robot in the upper third of the photo, it was removing the filled casks from the line and stacking them up for a human fork lift operator to move to the warehouse.