17th November 2015. Rosita Harbour, South Georgia.

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(Map of journey . . . . . . . . . (15. Rosita Harbour)).

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The weather looks fine enough here but it must have been a grey dawn again because we didn’t venture out until after breakfast.  There was a cordon of male fur seals on the edge of the beach, protecting their individual territories so some of the expedition leaders defended a corridor with zodiac paddles to allow us to disembark past the seals.

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After that, the seals were much more thinly spread.

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Looking back at the beach, there are quite a few seals and a few humans amongst them.

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Rather than hang around on the beach and photograph seals, I decided to go for a walk…

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… up  into the snowy distance.  There are a few people ahead of me at the left though you may need to click for a larger image to see them.

 

But I also had another objective.  I was fascinated by the prospect of photographing the forests of South Georgia.  You might think that it’s effectively part of Antarctica, there would just be rocks and snow but there is vegetation as well.  And in some places the forests may reach a centimetre high or more.  No actual trees, mind you.

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I found the textures on this rock and the living and dead lichen on it particularly fascinating.

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Perhaps you need to click on an image and see it larger to appreciate, but there is a lot of variety in texture and colours in these images.

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All of them are focus bracketed.  Macro shots have an extremely shallow depth of field so I have combined many exposures taken at different points of focus to give a better sense of how we would see it.

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The grasses out of focus in the background give it away but it this a mighty mountain range or some rocks sitting in moss?

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I was climbing to a ridge and I later saw from some other people’s images that there was a spectacular view there over other bays.  But I didn’t get there.  I had spent too much time on the macro shots, it can be very slow walking through heavy snow, and I had to get back to the beach by a specified time, so I got to the point where I just had to turn back.  This was probably taken at that point.

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I wasn’t quite as far out of time as I had feared.  I felt relieved when I saw there were still people just ahead of me. If you click on this image, you can see that the two people in the middle left are well before the beach and that on the beach there are numerous seals and at least one person and a zodiac to the right.

 

These were taken later, from the ship.

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We were heading back again to Salisbury Plain, for an afternoon landing, the last of the trip.

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