Devil Island, Antartica

[beldridg]

Following up on my Antarctica trip report, here is the first location specific dive report.

This covers Devil Island and another unnamed location. It was quite the adventure with 100mph katabatic winds kicking up while were on our checkout dive. I will only publish the posts that contain dive reports here since this is a "scuba specific" discussion board. I did publish a previous post for Elephant Island but there was no diving but spectacular scenery and the obvious historical import to Shackleton's Endurance self-rescue.

Here is the post about Devil Island with some underwater pictures and some pictures/videos of the craziness of the katabatic winds:

Devil Island, Antartica

Background Devil Island was our first stop after Elephant Island. The images below (left to right, top to bottom) show our traveled path out of Elephant Island (in red) and our planned path to Devi…

wreckedinmyrevo.com

Regards,

- brett

 

[Johnoly]

It's a great series of trip reports and I enjoy reading about dive sites no divers have been to before. I understand that there is just a small handful of divers as part of a much larger group. Assuming the others can't get off the boat,, are they mostly outside standing at the boat rails taking pictures, or huddled inside staring out the windows? This isn't exactly a 12 story cruiseliner with gambling, nitely shows, & pool deck chairs where someone(not me) would be thrilled to stay onboard for a week without touching land.

They call us bubble blowers and we call them bird-nerds. Did you see LOTS of huge telephoto lens on board and expensive top-side camera equipment on deck? With how rocking that boat was, it must have been impossible to get long range photos for them.

Thanks for writing them up and taking us on the adventure !!

 

[beldridg]

It's a great series of trip reports and I enjoy reading about dive sites no divers have been to before. I understand that there is just a small handful of divers as part of a much larger group. Assuming the others can't get off the boat,, are they mostly outside standing at the boat rails taking pictures, or huddled inside staring out the windows? This isn't exactly a 12 story cruiseliner with gambling, nitely shows, & pool deck chairs where someone(not me) would be thrilled to stay onboard for a week without touching land.

They call us bubble blowers and we call them bird-nerds. Did you see LOTS of huge telephoto lens on board and expensive top-side camera equipment on deck? With how rocking that boat was, it must have been impossible to get long range photos for them.

Thanks for writing them up and taking us on the adventure !!

Good question.

For sure, the other people get off the boat and go explore land areas. My next report will be for Brown Bluff where I actually chose to go ashore instead of diving because I wanted to make 100% sure I set foot on the mainland of Antarctica (usually the divers would go ashore after the dive but not always).

There were 16 RIBs on the Hondius and usually 4 of them were used for diving and the other 12 were used to shuttle people ashore for sightseeing, hiking, etc.

There were plenty of people with huge telephoto lenses on board. I had the Sony 100-400 and got some decent bird pics (I'm not a birder and this is the first time I've tried) and some great whale pics. When the ship is moving at 13 knots, it is hard (but I saw people doing it effectively) but it is often stationary or just moving slowly.

There is plenty to do besides diving.

HTH,

- brett