We pulled out of Gold Harbour and headed southeast towards the tip of South Georgia and were soon picking our way through an amazing collection of icebergs. This ice alley had resulted from the fragmentation of a massive tabular berg broken away from one of the Antarctic ice shelves – you could see the annular lines on many of the bergs. Experienced crew said it was the best display of bergs they had ever seen in the seas around South Georgia. It was an indescribable sight, a jaw-dropping experience, but one that was practically impossible to capture in photographs.

At the end of the alley we entered Drygalski Fjord, another wonderful feature that the island has to offer on a clear, calm day – again our luck held. We motored slowly up the long, narrow rectangular inlet dotted with growlers, bergy bits, and small bergs, and surrounded by almost sheer mountainsides covered with ice fields and glaciers – all this to the sound of Pink Floyd’s “Echo” playing on the bridge sound system (the bridge crew proved to have an impeccable taste in music). By now, words had begun to fail most of us as we advanced up this spectacular scenic wonder. When we reached a dead end at Risting Glacier, the helmsman turned us around on a dime, using the bow and stern thrusters to keep us from hilting some sizeable growlers that were providing roosting spots for Terns and Snowy Petrels, and hunting grounds for a Leopard Seal.

By now we were suffering from sensory overload and were almost looking forward to having nothing to look at. By the time we exited Drygalski Fjord, passed the end of ice alley, and turned south and then west around Cape Disappointment (so named when James Cook realised he had not discovered Terra Australis), our wish was granted as the wind picked up, the sea rose, and we were soon rolling along in a gale towards the Antarctic Peninsular. They say you can have four seasons in a matter of hours in this region, and today we had just about experienced that. It had been a truly golden morning to end our visit to the wonderful island of South Georgia.