Ushuaia. You can’t get there from here.
Again I am having a horrid time trying to get online and stay on. I burned through 480 minutes of internet time mostly sitting and waiting for Yahoo or something. Now I’m started on the second 480 minutes. It is most frustrating.
On the catamaran heading out on penguin trip.
Should anyone argue with you that God does not have a sense of humour, simply show your antagonist penguins. You’ll win. Today I took a boat tour the length of Beagle Channel off the tip of South America, just to visit a penguin rookery (Beagle Channel is, in fact, the dividing line between Argentina and Chile). For the record there were Magellanic Penguins, a cluster of Gentoo Penguins, and a scattering of King Penguins. Mostly they just stood around. Sometimes they walked from here to there. A few were napping (they are tummy sleepers). But they were all terminally cute doing what they do.
They were admixed with rock shags, a black-and-white cormorant that looks very much like a penguin but doesn’t waddle so much, and it flies. There are two other sorts of cormorants common here, and they too have crisp white fronts and black backs. Seen from a low angle, the penguin rookery looked like as big long bar code.
I couldn’t get close enough to the penguins for a good photo, but here is one of King Penguins.
The cormorants have rookeries of their own as well, a sea of black and white on rocky islets. And the black-browed albatrosses nest here also.
A Magellanic Penguin.
Both going and coming on this tour, I saw wonderful birds. Chimango Caracaras don’t normally stir the soul, but I was ecstatic. Well, maybe not ecstatic, but pretty darn happy. The tour was by catamaran from Ushuaia in the east up the Beagle Channel to the penguin rookery over an hour away on the west. And back again, of course.
The channel is alive with birds, and the topper was a fin whale, tail slap and everything. It is late evening now and the Queen Victoria is headed west through the Beagle Channel where I went today, on our way to Punta Arenas in Chile. We’re leaving the Atlantic behind.
Off to starboard, the sooty shearwaters are settling in rafts for the night. Thousands of shearwaters. Clouds of shearwaters. It’s sort of like the murmurations of starlings in Tacoma, where a vast cloud of starlings swirls down to roost under the pilings of TGIFriday’s or somewhere on Commencement Bay.
A Gentoo Penguin colony.
Incidentally, the locals pronounce the name of their town shWHY-uh, nearly eliding the initial U.
Of interest too are the navigational aids—the few there are. Beacons or buoys flash white lights near the most egregious hazards, but not many shallow spots are marked. You can tell shallow spots better by the kelp, which needs to anchor in ground not more than five or six fathoms deep. Navigational beacons are nearly all on the shore, which rises steeply. The points usually have a light.
Punta Arenas does not have a berth big enough for the Queen Victoria, so she will anchor out, and we will all be tendered ashore. We who have excursions scheduled will be given priority (I am going to Magdalena Island and its penguin preserve). Overdose of penguins?
I hope so.