After breakfast on February 5, the ship sailed around to Stromness
Bay. We landed a couple hundred yards from the whaling complex where
in 1916 Shackleton finally reached salvation. He had endured 16
months of entrapment by the ice of the Weddell Sea and an open boat
journey across the roughest waters in the world. After he landed
in King Haakon Bay, he hiked across South Georgia to Stromness.
Four months later, he was able to rescue the rest of the men he
had left behind on Elephant Island.
The Stromness whaling station was established in 1912,
eight years after the one in Grytviken. The whaling operation was
curtailed in 1931 during the depression when oil prices dropped
but the site continued to be used as a repair yard until it closed
permanently in 1961. Today it is in total ruin and was off limits
to us for safety reasons.
Instead,
we spent a while on the beach watching the comical antics of the
fur seal pups at play. They were born between late October and early
December and gather on the beaches to wait for the females to return
from foraging trips. There
were a couple blond fur seal pups among them. We learned it was
not an albino as it has some pigmentation. It is a genetic variation
that occurs in roughly one in every thousand pups.There did not
seem to be any prejudice against his color among the rest of the
seals.
For more photos of Stromness, go to Stromness
Photo Gallery. To read about the next location visited, go to
Jason Harbour.
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