December 28 - Monster ice berg

As we have been steadily heading south, we passed the polar convergence around lunch time with the commensurate decrease in temperature and parallel increase in fog! It is really very dramatic!  We are going to make the Drake in under 36 hours, so tomorrow morning we will have our first landing at Half Moon Island. The day was filled with activity getting everything organized - bio-hazard checks, boot exchanges, briefings, etc.  Just after we completed our evening briefing, the captain announced that a large iceberg had been spotted about 20 minutes distance away.

It turned out to be a monster tabular iceberg about 3 X 2 km in size! Truly amazing!  We circumnavigated the berg while being followed by a large flock of the beautiful black and white storm petrels.

sighting of the ice berg emptied the Grand Salon!

People got their first taste of what it is like to be really cold! With wind chill it was a lot below zero!

The ice berg had interesting arches.

Truly massive in scale - it was like a bit of Antarctica coming out to meet us!

Those of us prepared had dinner al fresco - note Matt's gloves!