Day 7 – Continued –
Today’s afternoon temperature was a sunny, warm 42 degrees, with crystal blue skies. This ended up being the warmest day in Antarctica. While that may not sound like warm, when we’ve got all of our layers plus our parkas, it makes for a warm to hot day. Many of us shed a layer or two for our afternoon landing.
This is a view of a group of mountains known as the Seven Sisters, in the Gerlache Strait near our afternoon landing area. Stunningly beautiful!
This afternoon’s landing site is Port Lockroy, another first for an
AbD Antarctica expedition cruise. This one has us all very excited when John shared it with us in yesterday’s nightly briefing, for several reasons.
A little background - this is a UK research station. It was established in 1944 during WWII and occupied until 1962. The British left it for several years, then re-established it in 1996. The original research building is there and now houses a small museum, one of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust sites…and a GIFT SHOP! Yes, folks, we will be able to do some shopping on Antarctica while helping to support the UK Antarctica Heritage Sites.
There is a new research & living quarters hut for the researchers that has been built behind the museum. Due to Covid, there was a two-year suspension on sending people to staff it; they just resumed staffing in the fall of 2022. Over 6,000 people applied for four positions; in another historic first, four ladies were selected for the five-month assignment from November through March. Here is a news article that caught my eye last fall; I never expected we’d be able to stop there.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/antarctica-post-office-count-penguins-jobs-uk-antarctic-heritage-trust/
The site has no running water, so the people assigned there depend on passing ships to get an infrequent shower. Supplies come from UK ships heading to or from the Falklands every couple of weeks or so. There is also no internet; they only have email.
AbD guide Michaela had another surprise for us last night - there is an official UK post office on the island, and she had worked with one of her friends to design a special post card for us to mail from here! Wow!!! Penguin Post, gotta love it! And, this is our third AbD Antarctica First of the day, to be able to mail postcards from Antarctica. The post cards were delivered to our cabins the prior evening for today.
The station postmistress, Clara, came on board after lunch and shared a presentation in the theatre about their mission and operations. This was very interesting.
We’d written and addressed our post cards before lunch. Clara brought over their postage stamps (which only have penguins, of course) and a special UK Antarctica postmark stamp. We got our post cards postmarked, and would be able to mail them from Port Lockroy if we wanted to do so. Clara would then hand-cancel them & load them up with other mail on a passing UK ship headed for the Falklands. From the Falklands, they will be flown to Great Britain and then dropped into the post for delivery all around the world.
Sample of stamps at the Penguin Post Office -
Postmark on the left, hand-cancellation on the right -
** Post-cruise note - my postcard was dropped in the Penguin Post on 5 January 2023 and arrived in California on 16 February, six weeks later. I’m happy it arrived in great condition, no real damage from its long postal journey. I’m still waiting for my postcard from the End of the World post in Ushuaia.
Because this island is so small, we would go over in our individual color groups rather than our usual two groups per landing. Each group would have 45 minutes ashore there, which doesn’t sound like a lot but was enough time. This is also why we had such an early start time this morning, so we’d have sufficient time for everything related to Port Lockroy this afternoon.
Lower right corner, those snow-covered rocks in the bay, is Port Lockroy base.
A closer look at Port Lockroy - the large structure in the center is a storage hut; the roof peaks of the old museum building, their new station building, and the radio antenna are just barely visible over the crest of the snow on the rocks.
Continued in next post –