A beautiful morning, sunny with barely a cloud in the sky. We had been prepared for gray skies and even rain which are more normal for this area, so this has been truly fortunate. Temperature today about 58° so we only wore one layer for the zodiac trip to Gothul. We had a lovely vista of rock walls over to the shore, where we went to a fur seal “preschool” filled with pups and yearlings just playing and swimming and endlessly entertaining. We saw one pup still nursing, though our guide that was unusual for so late in the season. They played and poked, diver and rose up, sat picturesquely on the rocks, and swam quite close to the zodiac, very curious. We could see some tiny swimming creatures, and spotted briefly a jellyfish near 5e surface. A few Gentoo penguins were on a rock with a giant petrel and some fur seals, all happily co-existing. One the way back we saw a waterfall, much larger than the one yesterday, and deeply undercut rock overhang. One of the best parts was going through a whole forest of bull kelp which was undulating in the water … mesmerizing, this will be a new zoom background for sure. Watching a log burn and watching the kelp float and move are both meditative. On our return, one more bio-security check before we head to Grytviken this afternoon where the government staff will check everything that might be going onshore, Barney did the big cleanup while I updated the blog.
After a nice lunch of surprisingly good sushi, we headed to Grytviken, the former whaling site. This was built around 1904 and operated until 1964, at its peak it had about 400 people working there. A whaling site, it epitomized the factory period of whaling with explosive harpoons, mass whale deaths, and shipping out thousand maybe millions of gallons of whale oil from almost 2,000 whales they killed each season. We made the obligatory stop at Shakleton’s gravesite, and at another site a fur seal wa draped sadly over a gravestone. We walked through the remains of the giant equipment of the heyday of the place, stopped at the post office to purchase and send some postcards, and then visited the museum briefly before going on a historic walk with one of the staff. There were about 6 people who work here for the summer season. The guide took us around the site and shared some interesting information about life at Grytviken, where about 1/3 of the people were mechanics, cooks, and other professions supporting the whalers and processors who worked 12-15hour shifts. We visited the little Norwegian church and I sang Ave Maria Virgo Serena (The Joaquin), it did have beautiful acoustics. Back to the museum for about an hour, seeing a replica of Shakelton’s lifeboat in which he crossed from a elephant Island to South Georgia, and quite a nice collection of artifacts form the whaling days as well as natural history specimens. As usual, we closed down the museum and were the last to leave the area on the zodiacs. As the sky began to gray after a beautiful sunny day, we moved out into the open ocean to reposition for tomorrow’s adventures.
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