Godthul and St. Andrews Bay South Georgia - 1/21/2025
- sridgway38
- Jan 20
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 9
We started our day in a really beautiful protected cove called Godthul, still in South Georgia. When we first arrived we were greeted with a large iceberg covered in Penguins. They had planned some hikes and it was supposed to be snowy and windy but when we arrived it was actually beautiful and warm and sunny so we got a surprise treat, instead of hiking we were able to kayak on the bay. They had enough Kayaks to take about half the ship at once, so we went out in 2 shifts. We were part of the first group and it was beautiful.
After Kayaking we went to St Andrews Bay which has the largest King Penguin colony in hte world which has about 264,000 breeding penguins. We had a difficult zodiac landing that had the expedition staff including Jamie the leader about armpit deep in water catching and releasing Zodiacs to get us on beach. From the landing zone we had a short hike to an overlook over the colony past seals and penguins. It's amazing to look out on that many penguins and to think that South Georgia, which had it's habitat destroyed by Whaling and Sealing ships introducing rats and mice unintentionally and then killing so many of the native whales and seals intentionally, has now been restored. The work of a relatively small handful of people committed years of their lives to restore this habitat and the wildlife that is native to the island have returned in large numbers. We have several members of the ships expedition staff who spent years of their lives committed to this work. In downtime on the ship there are lectures and presentations about how they did that work and the recovery that has been achieved. Each of the scientists have a specialty that relates to the things that we're seeing. It's hard to imagine anyone leaving this ship and not understanding the negative impact that careless humans can have on these beautiful places.
We headed back to the ship and had our usual recap and briefings on the ship before dinner. Tomorrow is out last day in South Georgia which is an absolutely stunning place.