On 30th November 2025, we landed on the continent of Antarctica at Cape Dubouzet, a site that barely figures in a Google search. There wasn’t much by way of wildlife. A pair of penguins somewhere over a rise, someone said later. I didn’t see them. The Expedition Team had put out red flags to show where we could walk a circuit if we wanted to.
Cape Dubouzet is at the north-east tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Charted by a French expedition in 1838, it was named after the captain of another ship. Sites mostly seemed to be named in this or similar ways after Captains or their ships.
It was easy to conclude that this is not one of the most popular sites to visit and that this was because there’s not a lot of wildlife. Cape Debouzet was not on our original itinerary. I wondered why this site was chosen for us and a number of possible answers came to mind. One is that we didn’t have a queue of ships in front of us. Another is that it is still early in the season and the number of sites where we can actually achieve a landing are probably limited. There’s lot of ice around. More than I remember from my previous visit to the region. At least we could land here.
I could feel that there was weather coming so decided to cut my land-time short. When I got back to the ship, after an icy Zodiac ride, I took advantage of the empty Jacuzzi. Later I examined the itinerary that was given to us at the beginning of the voyage, two weeks ago. Yep, this site was not on it. Hope Bay was, but earlier in the day we found there was too much ice to land or even have a Zodiac cruise along its shore.
I had brought along my logbook from the Antarctic voyage I did in 2009. It was two weeks earlier in the season.
We made nine excursions that trip, over the course of five days.
My entries note heaps of wildlife and I remember a highlight was a visit to Port Lockroy, a former British naval base where there is now a post office we could send postcards from, a gift shop and museum. All were surrounded by gentoo penguins. Like seals have colonised Grytviken whaling station on South Georgia (see my post about there here).
This is the list of the main Antarctic cruise ship visiting sites form my 2009 logbook. Many of them we were due to visit on this voyage according to the itinerary left in my cabin.
I searched the database of landing sites for cruise ships on the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators website and came up with nothing for this Cape.
This is a typical voyage map of the South Shetlands and Antarctica Peninsula.
But there’s something to be said that we visited Cape Dubouzet, a site few have been to before us. Then again, there are reasons that certain sites are more popular than others. There are still a couple of says to visit more sites. Onward explorers!
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