go-bassn wrote:
So Ron, how was your South American trip???

Warren

Quite and experience - saw things I never thought I would see in my
life. Penguines everywhere, whales, seals and ice bergs. About the
fourth morning out something woke me up shaking the ship and crashing -
ran to the window and nothing but ice floes and bergs as far as you
could see. They avoided the bigger ones but ran right over floes 30 or
40 feet long and 4 feet thick - shook the ship enough to wake me up.

It was amazing having penguines waddle right by you going to their nests
- they would pretty much ignore you if you were more than four or five
feet away. And I never thought how bad it would smell - penguines nest
in colonies of thousands in the same rock islands year after year, and
the poop never goes away, just melts and thaws back out. You could
smell a colony miles away!

Antarctica is an amazing place - some days we would be looking at ice
bergs against ice cliffs 200 feet high and off in the distance it would
look like a low lying cloud, then we would realize it was an ice field
rising up thousands of feet and running as far as you could see. The
captain took the 400 foot ship right up to a flat berg - one that was
formed when the ice shelf of a glacier broke off. It was at least three
times as long as the ship and you could not see the top from the top
deck of the ship. And it was at least as wide as it was long.

Some of them were this incredible light blue color, and some had that
blue streak in them. There were all kinds of shapes and sizes.
Everything there was white, grey, black or blue. Really missed the
color green!

They took us off the ship in Zodiac rubber boats - with 32 hp diesel
outboards - did not know they even made a diesel outboard. They were
Yanmar. Said they needed diesel for the torque, and I am sure it helped
carrying only one kind of fuel. The ship provided rubber boots knee high
and red parkers that were very warm. I wore my guidewear pants since we
often had waves splash over the sides of the boat and got out into knee
deep water usually.

Anyway, they would take us 10 at the time to islands to walk around for
an hour or so - often riding thru slush ice that would kick up the
motor. Air temps were in the low 30s - it is the middle of the summer
there. A once in a lifetime experience.

I was disappointed that I was too far south for peacock bass when in
Buenos Aries. They are several hundred miles north, toward the equator.
The river there is huge, really a bay, and muddy. There was a fish I
wanted to try for called a dorado - looked like a yellow striper with
teeth. They got big. But would have to travel about three hours upstream
to get to them, and we only had a day and a half there.

Glad I am home!