At Sea

“In memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in his splendor, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man...”
Sir Ernest Shackleton

A day at sea aboard the expedition ship National Geographic Explorer. It is difficult to say a day at sea is something that we ‘need,’ as most would love for our adventure to continue. Yet somewhere around the fourth day on South Georgia we failed to come up with new adjectives or expletives to summarize what we were feeling and seeing, so time to reflect and take pause, simply grasp the enormity of South Georgia or catch up on downloading photos and sleep, is welcome.

In looking back over the voyage so far, one barely knows where to begin, when did we first fall in love with South Georgia, and then continue to do so over and over as we discovered something new? Was it when we saw our first King Penguin? Was it the first time we heard an Elephant Seal roar? Whether we have taken 1 or 100,000 pictures this voyage, our experiences are forever embedded in our minds, and the tough part lies ahead, trying to convey the feeling to our friends and family back home.

Our adventure in South Georgia did not stop with the terrestrial world, as Magnus Haard as dive assistant and myself as Undersea Specialist, endeavored to explore and share as much of the underwater world of South Georgia as possible. We use a variety of tools to explore the underwater world, including an HD camera in an underwater housing and an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle). In some ways South Georgia still resembles its colder neighbor, the Antarctic; the fish still have antifreeze in their blood to help them combat the below freezing temperature of the water during the fall and winter, and there are still areas which are scoured by ice. However, South Georgia has a thriving kelp community, similar to that which would be found in Southern California. With the kelp, comes a host of other creatures; small mollusks move slowly across the fronds, eating small bryozoans or amphipods on the go; colonial ascidians attach themselves to the fronds, taking advantage of their elevation, using the currents to siphon water.

This afternoon we reminisced over our South Georgia photos during the Laptop Gallery, where the enormity of our time on the island finally had a chance to set in, as with so many grand experiences “Sometimes I do not really understand where I have been until I am leaving.”