BT – A Magical Evening

The evening began — perhaps surprisingly to those who see Antarctica as a wild, wintry place — with a barbecue outside on the aft deck. The weather was mild, there was a convivial atmosphere, and the antics of Nacho (Ignacio) — the Argentinian camping leader who took us on our overnight sleep out — kept people amused.

Being the party animal that I’m not, and with the evening being stunningly beautiful, I spent most of the time after dinner on various outside decks taking photos of the glorious scenery.

The Plancius just cruised gently around the channel, bringing various landmarks into view. This is Stony Point, where Catherine had spent the afternoon while I was mountaineering.

We also passed the Chileans’ González Videla Base at Waterboat Point, not realising at the time that we would be visiting it the following day.

We could see the island in Leith Cove, overshadowed by the mountains and crevassed glacier behind it. Later in the evening Day 2’s camping group disembarked for their night on the ice in this glorious location.

The mountains around the channel and bays still had their summits in the mist a lot of the time.

And I really was there; I didn’t grab the photos from some other source!

The light on the ice and the icebergs in the bay, and the reflections in the still waters, made it very difficult to take dull photographs (and made it challenging to avoid repeating photos because everything was worthy of a shot even when you’d already taken something very similar).

It was very hard, though, to capture the scale of the area. We were cruising back and forth in, perhaps, only an 8km by 2km stretch of water, yet we could see and sense the mountains beyond, and there were vast tracts of water, riddled with small icebergs, stretching out to our north. It really was an amazing evening.