Dateline March 8, 2018, Penguins and Cape Horn

The Magellanic penguins. Our next stop was Punta Arenas, and an excursion out to Isla Magdalena, in the middle of the Strait of Magellan, the most important Magellanic penguin colony in Chile and one of the great rookeries of Patagonia. Something like a hundred and twenty thousand penguins nest on that one small island.

Each year the birds come back to the same burrows; the females lay two eggs in October, the parents take turns sitting on them and, once the chicks hatch in December, take turns again at fishing the surrounding waters. The colony only keeps to the island from September to March, and it is fullest in January; by the time we came, in early February, the young were nearly grown, big fluffy things waiting on their adult feathers, and you can pick plenty of them out in our pictures.

The penguins are the show, but the island also has a handsome lighthouse, built in 1902, which now houses the park ranger.

Cape Horn. From there the ship made its way around Cape Horn, and the great rounding that has wrecked so many ships gave us, instead, calm water, small waves, and some wonderful views. We had perfect weather; but having read the old stories, we could well imagine how it might have gone. Ahead of us lay the Falklands.