Wildlife watching in Antarctica: An ice safari

The PA in the cabin crackles to life: "This is earlier than the early call you were expecting," says Dick Filby, wildlife expert and enthusiast in his deep, clear, BBC-style voice. "But folks, there are about six orcas, six killer whales, off the bow."

I throw on a few layers and some boots and a beanie and there they are, half a dozen of them in living black and white. Diving, surfacing and blowing in unison, they slide through the water with skin as smooth as kelp and dorsal fins like scythes.

It's mid-November in Antarctica and this is early for whales. Many of them are still making their way south, but still we pass some submarine-sized southern blue whales and a pod of fin whales in the Drake Passage. On scene in Antarctica, we add humpback and sei whales and the orcas to the list.

I'm aboard a One Ocean cruise on the hardy ship, the Akademik Ioffe, and the expedition staff make up a university of Antarctica: biologists, ornithologists, Antarctic historians and experts in its politics and practicalities, as well as a couple of artists and a top wildlife photographer (Daisy Gilardini).

They share an obsession with the White Continent, and they share a talent for storytelling, something that fills the hours on the cruise down and back. Reaching wider than their commercial remit, One Ocean also host a couple of scientists from California using drones to better understand whale behaviour.

Towards the end of our time in Antarctica, unable to make shore one morning, we take a "Zodiac safari". The weather is calm and cool with soft flurries of snow falling from a grey sky and a thin mist drifting over water that holds hardly a ripple.

The wildlife is all around – a Weddell seal sleeping it off on an iceberg and gentoo, Adelie and chinstrap penguins shooting through the water in their little squads (penguins carry perfect collective nouns – in the water they are a raft, on land a waddle).

Another group radio a humpback whale sighting but we are so involved with iceberg-watching, we stay where we are. Some of the ice is so clear, it might as well have come from the fridge, clinking along in the water looking for its gin and tonic.

Some of the bigger bergs are blindingly white on top, moving through every blue on the spectrum, the deepest of it disappearing with them into the ocean. Some icebergs look like flying wedges, others have patterns like organ pipes or big windows cracked open in them. Some have enough peaks to make a mini-mountain range.