The Snares

This cruise is to the sub Antarctic islands of New Zealand, and Australia’s Macquarie Island. It’s the sort of cruise that calls itself an expedition cruise, like most of the cruises I’ve been on. I suspect they’re a bit different to other types of cruise, and I’ve never talked about what happens on them. Firstly, we have a few mandatory briefings that would be common to all cruises - lifeboat drill, donning life jackets etc.. 

Then there’s the distribution of equipment - in this case, boots, jackets and life vests for the zodiacs. We also get briefings on what we can and can’t do, how to behave around animals, how to enter and exit zodiacs, and the bio security rules (in our case, all outer clothing is inspected and cleaned between each island visited, and every time we go out we clean, scrub and wash our boots with a high pressure washer). All this had to happen before we started to leave the ship for the first time.

So our first day is very busy with these administration tasks. And yet, we still had time today to get into zodiacs and visit The Snares. Unfortunately, there was a fairly big swell today, so we got wet boarding the zodiacs and the ride was bouncy, so I didn’t take my phone to take pictures. Just as well - it was tricky getting off the zodiac at the end, and we were all soaked. However, the ride was marvellous and we saw the Snares penguins walking up and down the cliffs and swimming around quite closely to us. There were enormous numbers of birds too.

I took a lot of pictures from the ship. Including petrels 

Albatross 

I 

Schools of penguins 


The scenery was quite misty