22ND JANUARY

We woke to hear Troels our great leader cheerfully booming through the speakers announcing that we had finally arrived in the South Shetland islands. We looked out of the curtains and for the first time in 2 days we saw land and relatively calm waters! The islands were amazing and nothing like what I had expected. We were heading for the Aitcho group and were due to make zodiac landings on Barrientos Island and Robert Point. We dropped anchor and were told to go and prepare ourselves for our first zodiac landing. We were also informed that it may be a slightly bumpy ride over to Barrientos due to a strong wind. We headed back to our cabin and dressed for a landing! This involves putting on as many layers as you can. I had a t-shirt, my blue north face top, windstopper, puffa coat and waterproof along with thermal leggings, my green north face pants and waterproof leggings, a hat and my new waterproof gloves and this was before I put on my life jacket! We were both getting ex

ceptionally hot in the cabin so were very relieved to get on deck, but once we felt the chill of the wind we were glad to have so many clothes on! There were to be four zodiacs heading to the island and the fifth was taking the Russian divers out for their first check out dive!

As promised it was a bumpy ride to the island and the wind was incredible. To our amazement we saw our first penguins almost immediately. They were Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins and there were thousands of them all chirping and busying themselves with one thing or another! It was incredible! There were quite a few chicks that were in the process of losing their down and looked like little bundles of fluff! There were also a few Elephant seals chilling out on the beach, but we didn’t really take too much notice of them due to us being transfixed by the lovely little Gentoos. Troels had previously told us that we were free to