Today is likely our last day for a landing. :-( We started with a Zodiac Cruise of Wilhelmina Bay near Enterprise Island. We expected to see some humpback whales this morning and were not disappointed! We basically spent the entire hour and a half looking for whales and trying to capture pictures of their flukes. I got a couple decent shots. One of the other guides, Tom, who is a marine biologist, wound up getting really close to one of the whales by just turning off the motor in his Zodiac and floating for a while. I got one picture of him leaning down where it looks like he’s about to pet the whale!

We were a bit overdue to get back to the ship so our guide didn’t let us go over to see the shipwreck of the Guvernøren. This Norwegian transport vessel caught fire back in 1916 and was deliberately run aground so the crew could escape. I did get a glimpse of it from the bow of our ship though.

After that, we sailed to Palaver Point where we expected to see our third species of penguin, the chinstrap. The landing site was a little crowded so we took Zodiacs around for a bit first and definitely saw tons of Chinstrap Penguins here! As soon as we got off the Zodiac on the beach, there was a huge elephant seal waiting to greet us. We hadn’t seen one of those before either! He wiggled around for a bit and tried to climb over a rock but slid down off of it onto his side. He recovered quickly as he was obviously a bit embarrassed with everyone watching him. Got a video of him moving along the beach…he was surprisingly fast for his size.

We took a handful of pictures of the Chinstraps and listened to them sing for a bit. They have a very unique chirp…we hiked up a bit of a hill following a path that was laid out for us. One little Chinstrap decided to wobble his way almost all the way up the hill too! He was so determined even though he had to take a few breaks just to make it. After our time on shore was up, we headed back to the Zodiacs. We got to ride with Marine Biologist Tom for the first time and he was fun to ride with. We cruised a bit out into the bay looking for more Humpbacks. It took us a while to find them (he had just seen some on his previous tour with another group), but once we did, we were rewarded with two! The wind was picking up so as soon as we got pictures of two flukes within a few seconds, we were instructed to put our cameras away as it was going to be a bumpy ride back to the ship. We had wound up going pretty far so it was a good half-hour super bumpy ride back to the ship. Well worth it though!