23.11. Last day in South Georgia
Today we had a Zodiac boat landing at 5:30am early in the morning at Gold Harbour! This is one of the spots with a huge king penguin colony of about 25.000 pairs! There were also many seals and this time they were mostly behaving nicely! The cute pubs with there big eyes were curious and they even looked for immediate body contact and also played with poles and other equipment! Then there were massive elephant seals (they could weigh up to 5000kg!) but here I always kept it safe with at least 10m distance!
Within 2:30h it is not so easy to get the right frames as often penguins are moving and there are some that run into your frame! Today was also crowded with other photographers, as we had only a short walk of a few hundred meters to the penguin colony! Usually we part in two groups of 100 persons each. But at least I got a few nice frames!
The weather today was calm with only 2 degrees temperature! A bit of rain and snow we had in the morning and the tops of the mountains are covered with foggy clouds! So they did not look spectacular today! I could only see some glaciers falling directly into the sea. So it was the first day with weather as I expected it from South Georgia before the trip!
The second excursion on a Zodiac boat I skipped as for me this place was not so promising for photography and I anyway will not take my expensive lenses on those little rubber boats! You always risk of getting them wet with salt water! Otherwise I have seen already enough penguins and seals today!
The third excursion was in the afternoon by Zodiac boots to Cooper bay: I was not satisfied for several reasons: my boat driver was again unexperienced and we wasted time on uninterested places, all passengers were beginners in photography and some even tried to get albatrosses from the far distance. Again a waste of time! I am sure that no one of these persons will bring back home a single great shot from today! Finally I did a mistake by selecting the wrong ISO for the beautiful Macaroni penguins, so lots of shots went unsharp! In addition framing from a shaky boat is always difficult! My best shots are on land when I have a bit of time for selecting the right frame! With a group of people you can only hope for lucky shots in a very limited time-frame! Maybe next time I am more lucky (also in selecting the boat driver!). It is frustrating deleting 400 out of 500 pictures for as of unsharpness or unfortunate framing!
Drygalski Fjord will be our last visited place on South Georgia! We will then be back at open sea and times will get rougher! Near South Georgia we were mainly in wind-proteced calm sea!
Soon we are heading for Antarctica and it will take us about 2 days to reach It! You will find the progress of the ship in the NEWS section (Live-Tracking) of my website:
www.franktschoepe.com
I plan to send waypoints each 30min and on day excursions each 10min.
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