13 February -Macquarie Island - 8 degrees Celcius - 54 degrees 30 minutes South

Dad thrust open the curtains this morning to the sight of Macquarie Island and king penguins porpoising through the sea. The weather was pretty drizzly. We skipped breakfast, kitted up and headed out to shore. Some of the rangers from the station met us and showed us around Buckles Bay. It is the site of massive condensers that were used to extract penguin blubber in the early twentieth century. There were also loads of elephant seals wallowing and lying in the grass.



One of the guests got a little too close to an elephant seal, who had probably been provoked by some up close photography. It reared up and bit her arm, tearing her jacket but luckily not reaching her skin. These seals are huge and about 5 metres long, so it must have been terrifying. I spoke to her later and she seemed fine

We wondered in and around the base and were treated by the rangers to Minties, Tim Tams and Mint Slices. They gave us a demonstation of a weather balloon launch and then we headed down to the beach to watch more seals and penguins. Their yellow and gold plumage is so much more than the Adelies in Antarctica.

After lunch we headed back out to another beach to see a massive Royal penguin rookery. Some chicks were still around and so cute! These penguins were much more inquisitive and I got my boots gnawed a few times. It was magical to be so close to them all.

We couldn't spend too long at Sandy Bay, as the permit only allowed half the ship aboard at the time. When we got back aboard, I checked and found out there were still some spaces left, so I jumped into a zodiac to head back out. This is where the adventure began...

The weather was pretty foggy and as we approached the shore, we couldn't see the landing site. Margie, one of the expedition team, leaned over and asked me "Do you remember the bearing to the beach?" That's when I thought something might be wrong. She got on the radio and called the beach "What's our bearing to the landing site?" The message came back that the fog was so thick that the beach was being cleared and we were to head back to the ship. We turned back and moved into the fog. Margie leaned back in. "Let me know if you can see the ship." That's when I knew something was wrong.

We could see nothing, so turned and tried to strike for the island, which we found again. We cruised up and down for a bit to try to find a recognisable landmark. Having no luck, we set the anchor and waited in a bay to save fuel. The bridge contacted us and told us they needed us to move to help the radar to work better. This still didn't work, so they used the foghorn. We heard nothing, so they tried again. Margie was on the radio "Negative, we cannot hear the foghorn" while the rest of us were tugging her jacket "Shut up, you can't hear it cause you're on the radio". It was too far away though and they didn't want to leave the sight of the shore, so we sat tight. We anchored again near some big rocky outcroppings called the Nuggets with a penguin rookery at its foot. Margie described this to the Macquarie Island rangers aboard and they recognised it, so they sent out a zodiac and we waited 10 minutes before we saw them come out. They had a GPS receiver and we followed them down the coast and then back out to the ship. We got a little cheer, but Dad looked like he had pooped himself :-P

We had veered too north of the landing site initially and when we were found, we were 3.2 km north of the boat, even though the landing site was to the south. With the radio contact, I never felt unsafe, even though we didn't know where we were. To be honest, I was hoping we would have to land and camp or something. It was really exciting!

In the evening, we had the guest talent show. I had mouthed off earlier in the cruise about my Suspicious Minds cover in karaoke, so one of the musicians put me down to do that. Another guest, Anke, was going to play guitar for me, but as we were practicing, we couldn't really get it to work, so we ended up reworking the lyrics to In The Ghetto but made it about seals and sharks instead. It ended up being a cute duet, although during rehearsals we got a little tired of it and worried it mightn't be funny anymore. It went down well and we ended up getting the highest score of 14/15 from the three judges. Although one of them was Dad and he obliged with 5/5. Yay for nepotism! Any hopes for prizes, kudos and various hazzahs were dashed later that night though, when Dad informed me that the scores were to be normalised so no one really won. Boooo!