Reel 20 - Wilhelmina Bay and whales

The clouds hang low in the sky.

Mountains are swallowed by cloud.

The diffuse sunlight makes the ice field feel even more abstract than usual.

A fairly typical iceberg, presumably shaped by a fairly typical history.

The Ocean Endeavour nestles between the sea and the brooding clouds.

The clouds added a new challenge to judging distance, making the sky appear to be a low ceiling.

The coastline was sometimes truncated by the cloud.

This hill doesn't quite reach the cloud cover.

I'll start this reel with a question I've been asking everyone when the subject of whales comes up: How big do you think krill are? I've always assumed they were really tiny, but they're actually around 5cm long. We had a contraption much like a bucket with a glass bottom on our Zodiac that we could push into the water and see what's in it clearly. What I saw was that krill are indeed approximately 5cm long, and that the water was almost thick with them. The bay was essentially an enormous krill buffet and it had plenty of customers.

Wilhelmina Bay was another place named by de Gerlache during his beleaguered Belgian Antarctic Expedition. The Wilhelmina it is named after was Wilhemina, Queen of the Netherlands, who was inaugurated while the Belgica was trapped in the ice. Adjacent to the bay is the Forbidden Plateau, which I was surprised to learn is not where penguins go to buy comics and Star Wars action figures.

With the abundance of krill, this was a pretty busy place for wildlife, the most prominent of which were humpback whales. We'd encountered a few whales by this point, but mostly from a distance. This was an altogether more thrilling experience. The whales got close to us. Sometimes really close. Occasionally they swum under our Zodiac which was very cool albeit also quite unnerving.

Despite the presence of many whales, the keener observers amongst you may have noticed that there aren't any photos of them on this reel. This is because photographing whales is really hard. This is where the proper adults with their grown-up DSLRs and ginormous telephoto lenses really cleaned up. The problem was, as is often the case with photography, largely one of timing. Whales spend most of their time underwater, where even the glass-bottomed bucket is unlikely to help. My View-Master camera, with its 25mm lenses and hand-winding (which was not entirely reliable, a subject I'll revisit much later into the trip) was poorly equipped for catching whales during their brief departures from the sea to breathe. To make up for this, I've posted photos from my other cameras in the bonus gallery.

So what were the whales doing? Well, mostly they were breathing. In this act their massive curved backs rose from the water and rolled back into it, exhaling vigorously as they transited. Their appearance during this was somewhat Gigeresque. Sleek, black and spikily silhouetted, there was something quite alien about them. It's strange to think that being mammals, they are more closely related to us than the penguins we so cheerfully anthropomorphise. Every time their titular humps rose from their water we all reached for our cameras in the hope that this would be followed by a fluke-revealing dive. This event was actually quite hard to predict and at times it felt like the whale was being deliberately reticent.

A whale took particular interest in one of the other Zodiac groups. It surfaced alongside them vertically so its eyes were out of the water. From this vantage point it observed these visitors to its buffet, perhaps wondering why they don't help themselves to some of the krill. There was also a whale accompanied by its calf. I imagine the whales in this region are used to being visited by benign rubber-bottomed visitors. Fortunately, here at least the grim days of industrial whaling are long gone, and the whales approached us with curiosity while we admired them with a hushed sense of awe. There was plenty of camera snapping, but there were also periods where, engine cut, we simply watched in silence. Hearing a whale's breath in the calm quiet of the expansive bay was an unforgettable experience.

Amongst all this tranquillity was a Chilean woman with a crossbow. Yikes! Do not worry - things aren't going to take a gristly turn. She is Dr Natalia Botero-Acosta, a marine mammal researcher working with the WWF. That's the wildlife one, not the wrestling one, in case the crossbow was giving you pause. She was there to take tissue samples from the whales, and the crossbow was her tool for doing so. There's an irony in using something so similar to the harpoons used to slaughter whales to aid their conservation, but it's a very practical and relatively safe way of doing so. Instead of a regular bolt, the crossbow fires a bolt with a special tip which penetrates the whale's skin before bouncing off, taking a small sample of skin and blubber as it does. This may sound alarming but when comparative sizes are accounted for it's akin to an insect bite. The whales barely notice it, if at all. The bolt is attached to a line so it can be retrieved and eventually analysed. A lot can be learned from hormones in the blubber samples, such as the whale's diet, or whether it is pregnant. All of this is valuable data used to track changes in the Antarctic ecosystem at a critical time when climate change and industrial krill harvesting are having a damaging impact.

The WWF were there to do more than perforate the local fauna. They also had a drone with them, which gave them a view of the whales far beyond what they could reach by Zodiac. Being able to survey a greater area from above they spotted more whales and shot some spectacular footage which they played back for us at the evening debriefing. They were also collecting samples of whale poo, which slicks on the water and like their blubber can tell a detailed story about the whale. I was however relieved that there wasn't a show and smell for this.

BBC News article on the WWF's activity on the expedition: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c0kkpqljdlko

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Bonus selection of digital 3D and 2D shots on Flickr