On a boat

I've fallen behind on my posting since a lot has happened in the last week! I left Ushuaia this morning and am now vacationing in Buenos Aires, so I can relax and reflect a bit. Last week I was lucky enough to go on a boat trip to see some of my fur seal and sea lion friends in live form, which was certainly different from seeing them from the perspective of half destroyed skulls. The sea lions down south were similar in many ways to the ones you find on coastal California, but one thing that was different and immediately obvious is that they appear shorter and fatter. They vocalized quite a bit, just like the sea lions to the north, but the way they vocalized was completely different. They sounded mostly like old men yelling, unlike the barking kind of noises you hear to the north.

The Blue Eyed cormorant with many Sea lions (Otaria flavescens). 

Sea lions in the Beagle Channel. The large sea lion in the foreground is an alpha male, guarding his harem

Selfie shot

We traveled a bit further up the channel, circling a mostly abandoned lighthouse except for a few stray cormorants. This was the spot most popular with the tourists, everyone had to get their selfie with the lighthouse (including me). Something that struck me as unique was how calm and tranquil the waters were in the Beagle Channel, surely nice for both the explorers who used the channel to avoid the rough seas of the Southern Ocean and easy fishing and sealing for the Yamana in their little canoes. Even so there are a large number of recorded shipwrecks around this area. As I learned in one of the museums, insurance fraud led to the demise of many of these.

We circled around and stopped by another island on the way back to Ushuaia harbor. This one was much quieter than the one with the sea lions, but had a number of relatively quiet Fur seals on it (Arcophoca australis). There were also a good number rafting in the water, holding there fins up out of the water. This is a common behavior in Otariids, a thermoregulatory technique (something humans are having trouble with) that allow them to either cool down or absorb heat, depending on the conditions.

Rafters on the right!

This concludes my posting for tonight I think, I'll continue typing some business later!