Part 3 It’s Penguin time!!
Land Ho!!! After four days of traveling, we make our first stop on a snowy Island with a Gentoo Penguin Colony and a Weddell Seal. I can’t describe the excitement of seeing that first penguin walking out of the ocean and onto land. My first steps out on the seventh continent, on a pebble beach with a Seal just soaking up the sun and the penguins waddling up on land or diving back into the water and leaping out into the sea. Keep 15 feet or 3 meters away from wildlife in Antarctica, it looks like I am close to the animals but I used a 300mm camera lens. 300mm lens has telephoto zoom capability, which in normal speak means I can get detailed clear photos from far away.
All the seals I saw were like this, lounging around and taking a nap—what a great role model.
This is a Gentoo Penguin. After the Emperor and King Penguin, the Gentoo are the third largest and fastest swimmers. Clocking in at 22 MPH or 36 KPH of underwater speed, around Usain Bolt’s speed.
I think I found the Micheal Phelps of penguins doing the front crawl swimming.
No one tells you penguins are dirty from laying in their own poop, the poop is pink, and it stinks of rotten fish, which is what they eat, so it makes sense.
It’s not just the animals that are photographic; there’s also the landscape.
I circled the ship we were on for scale; the photo below is a wide-angle view but without the ship. It moved between photos and the weather has changed.
The clouds cleared, and no boat near the sea stacks, the big rocks that jut out of the ground but aren’t connected to the landmass. But wait, there’s more as we get the super wide-angle view.
The next photo is a close-up of the middle rock formation in the above photo; it looks a bit grainy, but that’s snow falling in the background.
The same rock formation as the previous photo; I just turned the amount of black and white in the photo to 100%. It creates an outline of the rock formation or blizzard/white-out weather conditions.
A chuck of the glacier “calved” off the rocky island, it fell into the water and became an iceberg. This scar is what remains when this happens.
Am I the only one that sees a giant pimple?