Today is February 22, 2009. Today we are going to make 2 landings. There was an optional landing at 5:30am, but I decided that I didn’t want to go – my dad had a great time, though. We had breakfast, and then we zoomed off for Gold Harbour. There were a bunch of fur seals there, and a ton of king penguins. There were about 100,000! I couldn’t believe it. That was only one colony too.
Some baby fur seals were sleeping farther up the beach. My dad and I decided to go sit next to them. They were so cute. They have really big round eyes, that aren’t just for looking at and saying, how cute!!! They are used to see better at great depths under the water. They dive really far under the water – sometimes over 1000 feet deep, where it is mostly pitch black. They use their big eyes to see more clearly.
The king penguins are pretty big. They are about as tall as my hips. They are said to be very curious. They aren’t really that curious to me though – I’ve found that the gentoo babies are much more curious then the king penguins.
After about an hour on the beach we took a zodiac cruise. The man driving the boat is the best driver here. His name is Pete. I always love it when he is my zodiac driver. Once the cruise was done all the people got out of the boat including my dad - except me. I was going to drive the zodiac back to the beach! Now we had to shuttle people from the beach to the boat. It was great fun. On the way back from the boat when all the passengers were off I would take the boat and go driving off. I did that about 10 times. I drove the boat until everyone was off the shore.
After all the people were on the boat again we had lunch. We had a two-hour motor until we reached St. Andrews Bay. There was going to be even more king penguins there! St. Andrews Bay is where the fourth biggest king penguin colony in the world is! There is about half a million king penguins there! That is a lot of penguins.
My dad and I walked down the beach a little bit and sat down. Some penguins came walking up, and we sat with them for about an hour – just a few thousand king and us penguin friends. Then we walked back up to the beach. A penguin that had just finished molting was following us. Whenever we turned around we would see him and he would stop with us. It went on like this for a quarter of a mile. Then he finally pecked at me and walked away. It was funny because he walked all that way, pecked me and went on his way. It was like someone dared him to peck me!
I got to drive the zodiac again when I went over to the landing site. It was there when I made my first passenger trip. There were 10 passengers on the boat that I was driving. I felt a little sorry for them because I wouldn’t want an 11 year old driving me around in high winds and big waves. That was the first time I had ever used reverse. I was a little scared. After a minute or so I got used to it. Then I went back to the shore. It ended up that they didn’t need me onshore so I came back to the boat. That time I did a perfect landing. All the crew was saying good job – even the captain of the ship radioed down that he was impressed with my driving.
I then had dinner and went to bed. I had a good day.
Bye,
Emily
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