During lunch we pulled away from Penguin Island to re-position for our afternoon landing. Off to starboard, King George Island, ninety per cent covered in ice and snow, glinted in the sun – at last we felt we were truly in Antarctica. Soon we turned north into Admiralty Bay where the Polish Henryk Arctowski research station is located. Magic, the ship’s doctor had spent a year here in 1998, and he was showing his son Anton where he had been located. He is obviously attracted by challenging locations as he was off to Afghanistan for two years after this cruise. We landed on the beach nearby an Adelie Penguin colony, and paid a visit to the Polish base for tea and biscuits. Several ships had been unable to make Zodiac landings in the bay over the past few days, but for us the sea was calm and there was hardly a breath of wind.

There are eight year-round and five summer research stations on King George Island. Its proximity to South America is an attraction, and Chile has a runway at their base so it makes logistics much easier (and cheaper) for the other twelve nations to re-supply their stations.