The King

It was a 5 am start this morning to land at St Andrews Bay.  There are about 180,000 breeding pairs of King Penguins in this bay.  There was also the usual suspects of Fur seals with the males protecting their harems, fighting with other males, warning us off, mock charging and generally making an all time nuisance of themselves.  The Elephant seals were positively civil in comparison, in fact the small females or young ones would slug up to you quite curious.

There were glaciers in the background and the scenery was spectacular.  The Kings had last years chicks who were fledging into their adult feathers.  A lot looked like they were wearing a brown fur coat and many others had all sorts of weird hairstyles with bits of down still remaining.

It was back to the ship for breakfast and then another visit to the bay.

After that we motored  south again to Gold Harbour.  On the way we ran into some humpbacks lunge feeding.  (With the amount of food on offer we all associated with that)  Lunge feeding is where they swim up to the surface with their mouths open swallowing huge amounts of krill and then expel the water.  Nom nom nom.  We stayed with them for quite a while.

Gold Harbour is a magnificent place with a hanging glacier behind and lots of kings, petrels, elephants, gentoos and fur seals on the beach with green tussock grasses on the hills.

There was a real buzz of excitement at dinner that night.

The extra are:

St Andrews Bay, young elephant seal (doing circus tricks), Kings at St Andrews with one of the glaciers, fighting (seeing off) male fur seals, king chick nearly fledged, humpback lunge feeding, male elephant seal (isn't he attractive), Gold Harbour.