South Shetlands

The thick fog is there overnight. Dark, icy cold, and wet out on deck. It comes and goes, lifts and drops during the whole day. Now, it veils all the view, then lets the sun pass through, offering an astonishing spectacle of the southeastern coasts of Deception Island. There, in front of the rocky headland of Baily Head, the ship finds herself at sunrise. Low but long surge washes the shoreline at its feet, a beach that runs in a straight line for most of the eastern side of Deception Island. There, countless Chinstrap penguins group. In the background, a glacier front, covered in the rusty colours of the volcanic sand of the island and a valley that climbs up to a ridge over a series of rounded hills. The scenery is already fantastic, but this site is also famous for being home to the largest Chinstrap rookery in the South Shetlands. They are virtually everywhere along and across the place. From the beach all the way up to the last hilltops right to the start of the large glaciers that cover the highest point of the island, Mount Pond, over 500m above sea level. 

But the surge and the unstable weather situation do not make for trying to land here. After having a good look at the area, we resume our way towards the inner harbour of the ring-shaped and flooded volcano of Deception Island. 

Leaving Baily Head behind us, EUROPA sails once again straight into a fog bank, which makes the passage through the narrows of the Neptune’s Bellows (the one and only entrance to the caldera) of a special beauty. Here, Captain had to steer the ship along the cliffs of the so-called Cathedral Craggs, while on portside extends a large shallow area, with a distinctive rock barely submerged, the Ravn’s Rock. Once inside the large bay of Port Foster, the inner body of water inside Deception, the fog gradually dissipates while we still have ahead of us a handful of miles to do until reaching Telefon bay, at the northern shore of Port Foster. Once there, anchored in front of the small Gonzalez Harbour, we enjoy the blue skies, sunshine and warm temperature. The Telefon was actually a salvaged vessel moored in the bay in 1909 awaiting repairs. 

At the western coasts of the bay and starting our morning hikes uphill, we can see straight away that this part of the island is made up of secondary volcanic cones and several linked explosion craters, some flooded by the sea and others still as a sort of small lakes or large ponds. 

The highest mountain close to the coast is Cross Hill. To its top walked the ones of us that were up for a longer and steeper hike this morning. Rising to 160 feet above the sea level, on days like today with good visibility and the sun shining over our heads, it offers excellent scenic views over most of the island. Nowadays disappeared, a wooden cross erected at the summit by the whalers that operated here in the first half of the 20th century, gave the mountain its name. Separated from it by a shallow valley, another smaller ridge gives the chance for a leg stretch to the ones that wanted to take it easier. 

Spending the morning at the northern edge of Deception, looking southwards and at the distance, we could keep track of the low fog banks lurking over the island’s entrance, advancing and retreating while squeezing through the Neptunes’s Belows. Next to them is our next destination, Whalers Bay. 

Here, we are at just about the area that today acts as the limit between the fog and the clear sky, a most promising weather for ensuring great views. And with that in mind, we leave the visit to the remains of the Hektor Whaling Station for later, which buildings, boilers, tanks and a few houses still barely stand along the northern shores of the bay. First, we climb up the saddle amongst the cliffs that lead to the Neptune’s Bellows and some of us even to a higher viewpoint. 

The story goes that it was from this gap indenting the rocky ridge, the Neptune’s Window, from where the young sealing Captain Nathaniel Palmer in 1820 spotted previously unknown lands to the Southeast, the first sight of the Antarctic Peninsula. Unbeknown to him, in a time when long-range communications at sea were nonexistent, the continent had been sighted already months earlier by Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, a scientist and explorer sailing for the Russian Czar. Lucky with the weather as Palmer has been, from up the saddles and hills today we could also see the distant peaks of Antarctica over the misty areas that seem to engulf the southern shores of Deception.  

But the fog is low, up the hills, we are just walking above it. It quickly changes and moves, making the scenery a dynamic attraction, with the views and lights changing by the minute. Even now and then, the sun shines over the fog, creating a singular phenomenon, a fogbow, which is similar to a rainbow, but it lacks its colours due to the different refraction of the light that the size of the smaller mist droplets produce over the larger water drops of a typical rainbow.

Back down the slopes and ravines to the large Whalers Bay beach, we had the time to soak into the bloody past of the island and the chapter in history when thousands of whales were killed around those waters and processed here, at the Norwegian Whaling Station “Hektor”. 

This is nowadays considered Antarctic Historical Site. It started to be operational in 1912, and its closure was not until 1931. But the infrastructure was re-used for a couple of different purposes afterwards. First some of the whaler’s accommodations were rebuilt to be used during WWII as a military base for the secret “Operation Tabarin” to control the traffic of boats at the southern high latitudes, intercept radio communications that used the high atmosphere as the means for transmission and prevent the settlement of German Bases in Antarctica. When the war was over, the Falkland Islands Dependencies (the former British Antarctic Survey) used Whalers Bay for scientific purposes. 

The whaling fleet based in South Georgia and Antarctica during the austral summers, performed a large-scale operation due to the high demand of oil, used from lighting lamps, heating, infantry manufactures, and lubricants. The end of this era began when electricity started to be more and more of a common commodity, at the same time as the discovery and use of the fossil fuels and the mineral oils. Then, the market for whale oil dramatically shrunk, making it not profitable.  

Since then, buildings, oil tanks, boilers and other station paraphernalia lay around, all left to Nature and its elements to take over the place again. 

When we are all back aboard it didn't take long to bring the anchor home and make our way off Deception’s caldera and head straight into the Bransfield Strait. There is a long way to go across it until we can reach the Antarctic Sound and the coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula.