January 29th - Danger Island and Brown Bluff

 Life is pretty good when you can wake up and find this outside your window:

After sailing through "Iceberg Alley" this morning, we went for an early landing on Danger Island.  We are the first expedition to visit this island since 2018 and it was the first time ever for the Fram and its crew since the island is normally surrounded by heavy fragments of ice.  On our zodiac ride to the island, we saw many groups of penguins porpoising - they actually fly/dive out of the water like a porpoise.

Danger Island has a large colony of Adelie penguins (about 1.5 million), lots of birds (sheathbills and kelp gulls) and three types of seals(Wedell seal stretching, Fur seal coming out of the water and Leopard seal "smiling").  It was a rocky landing but worth the careful plodding.

After returning to the boat, the afternoon was spent watching Orcas (the killer whale, which is really in the dolphin family!), looking for other wildlife and watching icebergs and ice floes as we motored under fabulous, mostly sunny blue skies.  I never get tired of looking at the ice!