Exploring St. Andrews Bay via Zodiac

St. Andrews Bay - home to more than 200,000 nesting king penguin pairs

 

Wednesday, November 8 -  St. Andrew, South Georgia

From our daily briefing: “This afternoon we hope to explore St. Andrews Bay. At over 200,000 pairs, St. Andrews is the largest breeding colony of king penguins in the world. The colony itself is nestled in the valley at the base of a glacier and the setting alone is worth the visit. The site has unfortunately been closed to landings since November 14 due to HPAI (Avian Flu), we are however hoping to explore the area from our Zodiacs.”

So, in the afternoon, we positioned with the Endurance in Andrews Bay, which is a wide, semicircular indentation that lies open to the sea around 20 miles south of Grytviken. Its setting is spectacular, with a wide plain backed by four snowy peaks: Mounts Root, Kling, Nordenskjold and Brooker. Glaciers edge their way onto the grassy and tussocky plain that's home to several hundred thousand king penguins and the glacier melt has created several shallow fresh water lakes.

We were off on the Zodiacs at around 4:20 PM to explore the bay.  Unfortunately, it’s closed to direct landing because of the HPAI (Avian Flu), so we are at the mercy of viewing this amazing location via Zodiac.  We went on the Zodiac with Rob Edwards. He took us way to the right to see “rocks”, and we managed to find a long line of king penguins walking along the rocky shoreline and jumping off into the sea - very cute and entertaining.  Eventually, we continued around the bay to finally see the main penguin colony.  Beautiful setting, with glaciers coming into both sides.  Penguins as far as the eye could see - lots of elephant seals as well.  The smell was pretty bad, even from across the water, so perhaps it's not the worse thing to visit this location by Zodiac!

Beautiful ending to another adventurous day