Tuesday, November 30th, At Sea at Brujo Glacier

Unfortunately, the good night's sleep I had hoped for only lasted until 3 a.m. when the Veendam exited the fjords for a few hours of heavy going in the open Pacific. We were being tossed about pretty good, and I, for one, just had a hard time sleeping soundly. So I was dragging and my energy was flagging when we arose and prepared for another day of scenic cruising. The weather had, unfortunately, taken a turn for the worse during the night, and on deck we were faced with low, leaden clouds with periods of light to moderate rainfall. It was, all in all, rather depressing weather for sightseeing.

But having a nicely-cooked omelet of egg whites and salmon for breakfast plus a couple cups of coffee raised my spirits a bit. Thus fortified we returned to the Crow's Nest observation area to plunk down by a picture window and watch the Veendam work its way back up a fjord toward the glacier field located in the middle of the Andes.

We were about 300 miles South of the Darwin Channel, and I noticed that the hills and mountains of either side of the fjord were far more barren than we had seen the previous day. Many of the mountains were also snow-capped, and the spring meltwater produced some very small but very pretty cascades down the hillsides.

Although the initial plan was to view the Amalie Glacier, the clouds remained quite low and the visibility quite limited, so our Captain diverted the Veendam over to the Brujo Glacier. To afford us a good view, he took the Veendam right up to the edge of the navigable water at the foot of the glacier and gave us a very close look before pirouetting the ship around and heading back down the fjord.

The Brujo Glacier was a very pretty, bluish glacier with a lot of small ice floes bobbing around in the water at its feet. On one floe, I was startled to see a small penguin looking oddly at us. The naturalist also spotted sea lions, but all I could see was a black nose above the water so I never got a decent picture of those.

The compressed ice of a glacier really is a different structure than normal ice cubes, and curiously enough on a dark, cloudy day like we had we could see the bluish tint of the glacier ice quite clearly, both in the crevasses on the Brujo Glacier and in the ice floes in the water. The water was also so clear and pristine that we could easily see the large, underwater mass of each floe as well as the smaller area sticking up above the surface. I found the intricate shapes of some of the floes to be quite graceful and delicately beautiful

Taking some time out for lunch, we attended our third Spanish class with Missy and a presentation by Chris, the naturalist, on "Fire and Ice" where he described the geological origins of the archipelago through which we were steaming. Both talks were quite worthwhile, although Chris's presentation was perhaps more scientifically-grounded than what some of the folks might have preferred. When he mentioned plate tectonics and the great sweep of geologic history, I could almost hear some of the audience muttering "That’s just a THEORY!" to themselves. Sigh. We rounded off our afternoon by using Baby-Baby to download pictures and bring the trip journal up to date.

That evening we were still cruising in a narrow channel among the islands in the Chilean archipelago. During dinner I spotted an oddly-shaped island that had some parallel, straight lines on one side. Those lines looked so obviously man-made in a vast landscape of totally natural shapes that they caught my interest. I stared at them for 3 to 5 seconds before the scene "popped" in my vision and I suddenly saw the dull, reddish shape of a hull from a sunken ship that had its stern angled up into the air. The lines that had initially caught my attention were the remains of the superstructure, possibly the roof and railings of the deck cabin. Amazing how the expectation of seeing nothing but islands could influence my vision to initially interpret the dark, rounded hull of the ship as "just another island".

The evening show was a show put on by the four male singers of the ship's ensemble. The songs were the old pop favorites of the 50s and 60s, and they were loosely arranged around the story line of four street-corner boys in Philadelphia forming a singing group, which might have been inspired by the Jersey Boys I guess. They each had nice voices individually, which they demonstrated in their respective solo pieces, but they had also learned to blend with each other on the group numbers.