By 5.47, the hearty sound of shovelling woke me and I scuttled off again to the barrel, just before it was removed. Phew. I shouldn’t have had the ‘Salty Seal’ cocktail, the wine and the scotch. Ah well. Chalk it up to experience. And how. All round the camp there was pink guano evidence of penguins having curiously investigated the tents, some of them still waddling near. The snow we’d used to pack down the flaps had gone solid overnight so the tent took a bit of extricating, which explained the shovelling.
Afer returning to the ship, we had breakfast and a welcome shower and set out for a cruise round Cuverville Cove, where the mountains rise from the sea to 3,000 feet. We have sneaked up a narrow, icy channel into a large, circular bay, edged with eight glaciers, and currently, the captain is causing the ship to pirouette gracefully around its centre to maximise our view. Not entirely eco-friendly, but cute in a jaw-droppingly wasteful way. The reason is that we are about to partake of a deck barbecue. This morning’s excursion was round the bay, learning about ice, glaciers, sea-ice, icebergs and how it is all formed and behaved. What more pleasant a way to spend Christmas Eve morning than basking in 11° of sunshine on a mill-pool calm bay, watching icebergs calve from glaciers? How white can a Christmas get? The BBQ was delicious: King prawns, tofu burgers and tuna steaks for the non-carnivores and mulled wine. Plastic furniture was set up all over the aft deck, with the Zodiacs piled up on the top (inconvenient) deck to make space. After the meal, the furniture was dismantled and crated up for the next cruise. The crew never stops working, and setting that up was seriously effort-ful, but for we punters, great fun. Some groups had brought furry hats and one a fine Rudolph mask. All the crew had Santa hats from a box marked ‘Vavilov – Christmas’. It contained a tree, stick-on snowflakes, fairy lights and a bauble selection. Oh, if only Christmas could be confined to one box, rather than half a loft full! After lunch, we cruised in the Zodiacs round Wilhelmina Bay and Cuverville Island where there was a yacht fast in the ice, and several thousand Gentoo penguins. We spent a couple of hours on each of these activities, getting back to the boat around 7pm for a fine meal, and an update from Bill about ice conditions ahead. Basically, we are in the hands of Neptune – what s/he says, goes, and in any case, we are none the wiser about what we might be missing! The passengers are quite jolly, generally educated and obviously, not poor, and some more outgoing than others. I was taken aback by only three offers to perform at the evening show, however – a group of Australian women, led by a choir leader from Brisbane did a bowdlerised version of ‘Button up your Overcoat’, I did Victoria Wood’s ‘Music & Movement’ (the US contingent hadn’t a clue, but Oz, NZ & UK loved it) and a South African woman sang ‘Silent Night’ in Afrikaans, Zulu and English. Then inter-cultural boozing.