We were at anchor by Salisbury Plain at 5am but we had a leisurely start as we were the second landing at @ 9 .00am, the first landing was off at 0730am - landings are split because they can only have a maximum of 100 people ashore at once and we are 111. Finally when we disembarked it was worth it and there was no rush as the thousands of King penguins weren't going anywhere. We walked with Franz to the edge of the colony - today's picture - and just listened t...

Today was another day at sea, but there was a lot of preparation for our arrival in South Georgia tomorrow. Bio security is very important and we all had a mandatory briefing followed by our outer gear being checked to ensure we weren't transplanting seeds from the Falklands to our landing sites. Boots were scrubbed and some had pockets and velcro hoovered! Now we are in the Antarctic convergence the outside temperature is definitely cooler and any call on deck ...

Having left the Falklands we are now enroute to South Georgia with another 2 days at sea. Unusually we saw a massive 5 mile long tabular iceberg (today's picture) which had travelled from the Weddell Sea; it was a surprise to the team who had not seen it before and an amazing sight. The day was filled with lectures on: krill, the reason all the animals are here - it forms a biomass of 500million tonnes (twice that of humans) with most eaten by whales, penguins, ...

Christmas Day - we woke in Stanley Harbour - on a cool cloudy but brightening day. After breakfast we were taken by zodiac to shore for our last dry landing and were landed on the jetty - as we approached we saw our first antarctic fur seal basking on the end of the jetty. We immediately jumped on one of the buses and joined the 2 hour and very interesting city tour. It took us past wrecks of old ships, including the Lady Elizabeth - apparently there used to be m...

New Island is 148 miles from Stanley and has been long used as a whaling base, a sheep farm and an occasional guano collection base. It is since 1972 a nature reserve. At 0730 we disembarked by group, we are group 2, and headed to the sandy beach at Coffins Harbour, past a wreck. This our first wet landing - and the rubber boots worked well- on landing we regrouped and headed off, on an easy walk, up and over a grassy incline to the colonies of breeding rock ho...