A nice breeze and drizzle which switched to snow welcomed us to Gold Harbour, a relative small beach surrounded by glaciers and contains one of the largest populations of seal elephants.
A kind a odd but pleasant problem which occurred when we were trying to land was that it was to many animals on the beach. How are we supposed to get on shore without accidentally step on a seal? Our guides did a superb job though and within a few minutes we had a nice course sick sacking over the beach. These seal elephants are huge and a adult male may grow up to four ton, they are noisy and try to be even bigger to protect their harem and as a last resort, they may go to attack. Full speed ahead and nothing will stop them and trust me, you do not want to be in their way!
Normally they just sound really loud and they try to avoid fighting because it takes to much energy but sometimes, kind a rarely according to our guides they do and we were on the front row. Two fully grown males, roughly 4 ton each raise up and charge against each other. We were just standing there, exalted and looking at the fight while the guides started to be worried about our security
Back on M/V Hondius we aimed towards Cooper bay but the weather wasn’t with us today and the landing had to be canceled. Instead we had some more lectures and this time about seal elephants and penguins and I must say that with a wind of 25 m/s and snow it was quite nice to stay inside
seal elephant 
seal elephant 
seal elephant 
seal elephant 
seal elephant 
King penguins 
King penguin 
Credits Bill Smith