Day 11a: Fish Islands and Peterman Island
(This is part of a series of re-posts from my trip to Antarctica in 2009)
We’re currently anchored at 66° 01.0382 S 65° 24.0711 W. I was very smart going to bed at 9pm last night. This morning’s wakeup announcement was at 5am, and we had zodiacs in the water by 5:30. I was in the first zodiac with my roomie Steve, Michael, Chris, and Seth. We started at a beautiful iceberg with a blue hole in it and light coming through. Then, since there was space in another zodiac, Michael and Chris switched to the other boat.
Our driver, Tyler, was fantastic. Seth started nagging him immediately to get close to icebergs that we had no business being near. Tyler obliged. The shots I took completely blow away everything from yesterday. 17mm lens leaning over the boat with the camera almost in the water looking *up* at an iceberg. Everything bathed in golden light. I also used Seth’s 14mm lens a few times for some truly spectacular wide shots of icebergs and their underwater pieces clearly visible. And then there’s the shots with the 70-200 + 1.4x getting all the little icicles hanging down inside the blue holes. In two hours I took over 600 photos. Tyler was the hero today: without his driving we never would have come close to getting such good photos.
At one point Seth convinced Tyler to get close to a plate of sea ice. Seth jumped out of the boat, stood on it with his silver crotch gleaming in the sun, and we all got pictures. Hilarious!