Antarctica

On Tuesday, December 12, we were at Damoy Point.

Damoy Point is on the western side of Wiencke Island in the Palmer Archipelago. There is a well-preserved hut at Damoy Point containing scientific equipment and other artifacts. It was built in 1973 and used for several years as a British summer air transport facility and transit station for scientific personnel.

It supported a snow runway (ski-way) for flghts to and from the South Pole.
After longer-range aircraft were introduced it was abandoned in 1993. It was restored by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, a British charity responsible for managing six historic huts on the Antarctic Peninsula. There is another small, seemingly abandoned, hut at Damoy owned by Argentina.

Our first activity of the day was a long-anticipated submarine excursion in the waters at Damoy Point. Viking’s submarines hold 6 people and a pilot and afford nice views of the subsurface. The two on our ship were named “John” and “Paul”. We were assigned to “Paul”. For our dive the visibility was low because of the plankton in the water, but we did see some sea life and geology (gouges made by icebergs in the ocean bottom). We decended to about 260 feet and were under for about 45 minutes.

After the submarine trip and lunch on the ship, we were back on land to view the penguins and the Damoy hut. There is a sizeable colony of Gentoo penguins here. This species is the most prominent in this part of Antarctica, and can be distinguished by the white “swoosh” above the eyes and the reddish “lipstick” on the beak.

One of the rules we had to follow was to stay 15 ft. away from all wildlife, especially penguins. The reason was that avian bird flu has been found in South Georgia Island, some 1300 miles from the Antarctic Peninsula, where it has infected mammals. It is expected to spread southward with bird migrations. The ship followed decontamination procedures for all passengers’ exterior clothing before we did any landings, and implemented other protocols to prevent the spread.