Exciting Day in Punta Arenas, Chile

We woke up early this morning and had to leave the ship on our excursion to Magdalena Island to see the penguins at 7:50 a.m.   That hurt after having only 4 hours of sleep, but was it ever worth it.  There were thousands of penguins running around this island.  They are currently nesting so you could get just a few feet away from them.  They didn’t seem to mind us being there and walked right past us to catch fish and play in the water.   The trip consisted of a short bus ride from the terminal dock and then a 1-1/2 hour ferry ride to the island.  This is the only ship excursion that we booked but you can’t come here without seeing these cute little guys and the logistics prevented us from doing it on our on. 

 

Upon returning to the port to catch our tender back to the ship, we were notified that gale force winds were preventing the tenders from picking us up.  OK….so what now?  But they eventually started running again, but only putting 36 people in each tender.  With about 1500 ashore, that would take a while.   When our time came, we boarded our tender and it was tossed and turned in the waves.  After several attempts, we finally got secured to the side of the ship and the Holland America workers came onboard the tender to help all of us off….one at a time.  It was pretty crazy….or as Madilyn (our 6 year old great niece) would say, it sorta freaked me out a little.   After being transferred safely to the ship, we could not say enough good things about the nice young men that assisted us. 

Then if things couldn’t get worse (for the captain) our anchor got hung up on something and they couldn’t get it up.  We were supposed to all be on the ship by 5 pm and at 9 pm tonight, we were just informed that the anchor had been released and we would be heading to our next destination, Ushuaia, Argentina!

So, its 9:15 p.m., still daylight, and the ship is finally moving!