We next headed into Andvord Bay which is a bay of the Antarctic Peninsula itself. The land around the bay is mountainous with rows of alpine glaciers all along its sides. Once in the bay, we were completely surrounded by glaciers. There wasn’t a bad view in any direction. We spotted several pods of Orcas (or killer whales, but really in the dolphin family) in the bay and they swam along side our ship.

I wasn’t nervous about Andvord Bay, but it was the first time that we really got into some icy waters. The farther we went into the bay, the more we were plowing our way through the ice. Most of it was very small icebergs, but a few were attention-getters.

The first photo is not a great one and I took it in the distance. It’s what all the land masses around the bay looked like. You can see the glaciers at the water’s edge with one large glacier going up to the left and another glacier going up to the right.

In the second photo, this glacier is quite large and it appears to calve frequently. You can see many bits of glacier or icebergs in the water that have come from this glacier.

You can see why I was a bit concerned in the third photo. Our ship had to propel through this ice. Most of it was small size, but if you look at some of the glaciers farther back in the photo, they were much bigger and of greater concern. While it’s hard to tell from this photo how large these icebergs are, I can tell you that many of them made quite a loud bang when we struck them with our ship. We were constantly hitting these small bergs on our way through the bay.