Ultimate Experience

hi there, my name is robin west and i workfor seabourn as the director of expedition operations and like every year, it is an absoluteprivilege and honor to be able to come down to antarctica aboard seabourn quest to beable to experience the great white continent. it's very hard to describe to the averageperson what antarctica is all about. you can show them photographs and tell themabout it and tell them what they're going to see and experience in tales, but it's notuntil you get to antarctica and experience it for yourself that you really understand. welcome to antarctica; i hope you have anincredible experience. i hope it's everything you've dreamed it tobe and i hope you go away with an even better

impression of this incredible destination. welcome to halfmoon island here in the southshetland islands. it's a beautiful backdrop for our chinstrappenguins. we've got several colonies around here inthis bigger rookery and this one is quite accessible for us and it's also quite accessiblefor the penguins coming and going, feeding and taking over the incubation. if you look at the penguins that are lyingdown, they basically have one or two eggs. the egg laying is finished and they're justabout to hatch out probably within 5-7 days and you have some birds that are attendinga nest, a spock, possibly for next year or

maybe they even lost their baby this year,but by and large you've got mating pairs here lying down on eggs waiting for their matesto come back and relieve them for the incubation. seven white seals are having a snooze on thesnow, enjoying the sunshine, as the rest of us are. white seals are some of the champion deepdivers, so they're resting up after probably expending quite a bit of energy foraging outin the ocean and the waters behind us here in the south shetland islands and the peninsula. the past couple of years we've definitelynoticed that some individual white seals return to this particular area of halfmoon islandyear after year.

we can tell them apart by the markings thatkind of look like camouflage splotches found on the under side of their body, so with onephoto of a seal belly we can tell individuals apart similar to what you can with thingslike humpback whales and killer whales for individual identification. today we're at cuberville island, our firstgentoo penguin colony. lucky for us, we're in the snow, so our bootswill be nice and clean but if you're taking a look at any of these. some of the nests here are quite big. there are piles of snow that they're constantlybuilding up and even stealing from each other

and the females particularly like when themales bring them stones. even as we sit here watching we can see themales come back from feeding and they're about the relieve their mates from picking up stonesand presenting them to their partner. another interesting thing about this sitehere on cuberville island is the number of penguin highways where the snow is quite deep. in fact when we got ashore we had to landright on to the snow because there was no beach. it was all snow. so coming ashore on to this colony and thenup to the colony above, there were very distinct

penguin highways, kind of like what we do. the first group to come ashore sometimes hasa rough time setting the trail but by the end of the landing, it's all packed down andmuch easier and that's what these guys are doing. they're finding the path of least resistance. i'd have to say that gentoo penguins are probablymy favorite penguins. i think that all of us as your travel aroundand you meet these different penguins and they all have personalities. i think the gentoos maybe because they'reso chill, they just sort of sit here and are

very relaxed. maybe its their portly shape, i'm not sure,but i could sit and watch gentoo penguins forever i think. to navigate through ice is of course challengingcompared to our normal navigation. you need a good team of experienced officers. over the years since we started in 2013, wehave built a strong team on the bridge who are able to and have experience in navigatingthe ice. it's basically to navigate through a minefield because you have a lot of barriers around you that you do not want to hit.

we are here in antarctica to show as muchice as possible to our guests but at the same time, we do not want to hit it and when you'resailing around ice, you have to consider your speed. the more ice you have, the slower you haveto go to assess the situation, but also if you have an impact with a small piece of icethen you will not have any damage to the ship. also challenging is the wind because the shipis drifting a lot. when we are slowing down because of the ice,the ship is drifting so sometimes it's like sailing with a big sailing ship actually wherethe wind is sometimes against you and sometimes with you.

right here we are in waterboat point. this is a historic site where there was aparty of only two young men here in 1921. they were going to be part of a bigger expeditionto the deception islands but everything went wrong and so they decided they would do somethingwhile they were in antarctica and they hitched a ride with a whaling ship and brought itdown here and found an abandoned whale boat, a water boat here which they camped in andthey stayed here for an entire 12 months. they did the first real penguin study of gentoopenguins and then they made a title gauge with a water barrel and then a full 12 monthtitle study. i mean these two young men - incredible tocome down here 12 months, not fully provisioned

and having to live on penguins and seals. i just think it's such a wonderful story. today we're at hut, which was set up by thebritish antarctic survey in 1975 as a staging post to get men and materials for the south,so the ship would come in early season, couldn't get there because of the ice and it wouldland men and materials here and fly them from the region behind the house and fly them furtherdown south. eventually, they started flights direct fromthe south american mainland that flew direct there. this facility was closed in 1975, but it'snow run by the british antarctic heritage

trust who maintain the heritage of the britishantarctic survey here. most of us that are working on board, we havewhat makes it special is that it is probably one of the few places on this planet stillunknown to us where everything is clean, everything is big, you feel small yourself. it's just like being on another planet. personally, i cannot get enough and if i getthe opportunity, i will hang around down here until i retire.

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