What's the attraction of Antarctica? The possibility of discovering a new landing site is among my greatest thrills. Several seasons ago we had been trying -- without luck -- to break our way through to Seymour Island in the Weddell Sea. That year the pack ice was confounding everyone. Facing the prospect of a day without landings, I pored over the chart in a near panic. And there, on the south side of the Antarctic Sound just eight miles from Hope Bay, was what looked like a narrow beach under a close-packed fringe of contour lines, which offered a precipitous cliff alongside a glacier. Brown Bluff, it called itself. With only a few hours of daylight left, we gingerly approached this shoreline, charted a hundred years before and surveyed during the Second World War, but almost certainly unknown since then.

We soon anchored amongst a sprinkling of ice floes and overlooked by a truly massive volcanic cliff. With zodiacs in the water a few minutes later we landed on a gently shelving beach, backed by a slope which was home for a flourishing colony of Adelie penguins and scattered outposts of Gentoos. Antarctic terns patrolled the water's edge and snow petrels flew by the spectacular rust-colored 745-foot-high cliffs. Magic. It's since become a popular landing site for those tour ships venturing into the Weddell Sea, my favorite sector of the Antarctic.

Tony Soper
tonysoper@compuserve.com