MV ORTELIUS (Previous name Marina Svetaeva)

#5 of 12 ·
I just got of Ortelius from a Falkland Island/South Georgia/Antarctic Peninsula trip. We did have phenomenal luck with weather, which certainly helped, but yes, the expedition team did their very best to maximize our time ashore. Nearly all landings lasted 3-4 hours, often including time for multiple options (visit the penguin colony to the left, then hike up to the viewpoint on the right, then do a polar plunge if you want to). I was usually in one of the first 2 zodiacs off the ship, and I often stayed out until they very politely dragged us back for the last zodiac. I think in our 19 night itinerary, we managed to spend over 50 hours ashore (plus a few hours of zodiac rides and a ship's cruise through the Drygalski Fjord in South Georgia, which was a real treat).

It often felt as though our expedition leader Sara never slept. Each night they would give us a schedule for the following day (Plan A - of course this could always change), and often times they were able to launch zodiacs 15 minutes earlier than planned, trying to give us every extra minute they could.

I don't think I'll have the time or energy to write a proper trip report, but for those curious, we visited the following sites:

=====FALKLAND ISLANDS=====

North Point Island

Carcass Island

Saunder's Island (2 landings because there was so much to see)

Stanley

=====SOUTH GEORGIA=====

Stromness

Grytviken

Saint Andrews Bay

Jason Harbor

Fortuna Bay

Hercules Bay (Zodiac Cruise)

Gold Harbor

Drygalski Fjord (Ship's Cruise)

=====SOUTH ORKNEY ISLANDS=====

Shingle Cove

=====ANTARCTIC SOUND=====

Hope Bay

Kinnes Cove (Zodiac Cruise)

Paulet Island

Antarctic Sound (Ship's Cruise -- too much swell to do a landing...our weather luck was finally running out)

=====SOUTH SHETLAND ISLANDS=====

Whalers Bay at Deception Island

We saw over a million penguins in total, including mega king colonies and Adélie colonies, as well as gentoos, rockhoppers, chinstraps, and magellanics. There were chicks of various sizes of all types except chinstrap and magellanics (just based on the sites we went to). We saw nesting albatrosses with chicks in the Falklands and were able to get quite close to them; I'm not a birder, but seeing those amazing creatures up close was fantastic. We had hundreds of fur seals and elephant seals (including so many young ones, which were adorable), as well as a few Weddell, crabeater, and leopard seals. We saw a leopard seal destroying a king penguin in the water, which was pretty gruesome but kind of amazing (circle of life).

We had plenty of time to observe a huge variety of behaviors of these animals, which is the sort of thing that you never can convey in a trip report. And though this was my fourth Antarctic trip, every single landing showed me something I had never seen before. I cannot convey how amazing this trip was; our expedition leader said that she had never had such a long stretch of good weather on a FI+SG+AP trip. Of course, much of that was due to the good weather. But we wouldn't have had nearly as great of an experience if it wasn't for the expedition team and crew working very hard to get us off the ship as much as possible, as well as arranging special activities on Christmas and New Year's Eve. I think our expedition leader Sara was up until after 1:00am on New Year's Eve, and she was woken up at 4:30am the next day for work. She is a f***ing rockstar!

Of course, you never know what the weather will bring. And expedition leaders and teams change often and rotate between companies, so there is some luck of the draw. Someone else said that they had a slightly better experience with Quark than Oceanwide. I'd be willing to bet that some of the better guides they had through Quark had probably worked for Oceanwide at some point, and some of their less favorite guides from Oceanwide had probably worked for Quark at some point. There's a lot of crossover in contracts in this field, so I wouldn't use a single data point to pick a trip (good or bad). Unless you can find out who the expedition leader is. And if it's Sara Jenner, you can bet she'll do her best to maximize your time on shore (and tsk tsk at the people who head back to the ship early).