through open water we caught site of what we thought was Astrolabe Island. There would be no landing but a planned two hours of island sightseeing - hmmm we thought, you couldn’t even see 10 foot in front of you! The closer we got to the island the more we saw and as if by magic the fog miraculously cleared. It was almost like a theatre curtain had been lifted and there before us was the impressive looking Astrolabe Island. The first thing we saw were the cute little Chinstrap penguins being easy to spot due to their distinctive white faces and little black stripe under their chin. We watched as they all gathered by the waters edge egging each other on and hoping sooner or later that one of them would take the plunge! It is so funny watching them and seeing their reaction to water. A lot of the time its almost like they have never seen water before, the way they look at it and they always seem so surprised by waves, it really is comical. After the fog had cleared we could see the true outline of this steep

and craggy island. Again we were astounded by how high most of these penguins climb to set up camp! By now we could see all of the way back to ship and the landscape took on a whole different look. Wow we were certainly getting the best of all weathers!

After watching the Chinstraps for a while we moved on round the island and passed the Divers zodiac where we saw two Leopard Seals sleeping on an iceberg. They were very sleek and had almost smiley faces. They have a formidable reputation as penguin eaters and we were hoping that they didn’t take too much of a shine to our divers! As we moved slightly further around the bay we saw another Leopard seal which came really close to our zodiac and checked us out. Unfortunately we had some rather annoying people on our zodiac who kept standing up, blocking our view and making the zodiac a whole lot more unstable. Thankfully Speedy kept moving the