Tag Archives: Travel

Three Elephants in One Day

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Thursday 29 February 2024 – After a spell of weather sufficiently wild and woolly that one chap we know actually lost his glasses on the expedition that we decided not to participate in, and which has kept us all on board ever since, the day dawned bright and sunny, and there in front of us (well, actually to port, if you’re being picky) was the first of our three elephants.

Elephant Island is probably most famous as being the place from which Sir Ernest Shackleton launched his renowned and ultimately successful rescue attempt, by striking out in a 22-foot boat with two other men, aiming for South Georgia, where he knew there was a whaling station.  There, he hoped, the whalers would be able to help him stage a mission to rescue the 16 he’d left behind (see later).  He was ultimately successful and is therefore regarded as a hero*; and in his honour, today was being referred to on Hondius as “Shackleton Day”: an opportunity to review his exploits and then to follow in his tracks towards South Georgia.

Our captain took Hondius around Elephant Island to the north side, where we would be able to see Point Wild, the place where Shackleton’s men sheltered whilst he struck out heroically to rescue them.  From that side, the weather was less clement,

but merely overcast and breezy, a nice change from the horizontal rain of the previous days.

Whilst we’d been taking this circumnavigation, we had our second elephantine encounter, something which was actually quite magical, but very difficult to capture photographically; a huge pod of fin whales, feeding.  Fin whales are huge; second only to blue whales in size, and growing up to around 25 metres in length. There were, according to some estimates, as many as 40 of them, swimming around, blowing and feeding on the krill and fish that were disoriented by their antics.  As ever, I have some video, but the various stills Jane and I managed to get between us didn’t do justice to the sight, which was truly majestic.

If you look at the photo below, you can see that there are spouts right across the frame. It’s not a perfect image, but I hope it conveys the scope of what was going on.

Of course, all this disturbance in The (Oceanic) Force brought out all sorts of other creatures to feed on the fallout from the whales’ feeding.  There were porpoising penguins,

shags,

Black-browed albatrosses

and even a stormy petrel on a stick.

OK, it wasn’t on a stick. Or even a petrel.  We think it was actually a light-mantled sooty albatross. But I didn’t want to let the truth get in the way of a cheap laugh.

Eventually, we reached Point Wild, named, not because of any weather conditions, but after Frank Wild, one of Shackleton’s men, who had found it and deemed it a suitable place for the rest of the men to shelter whilst Shackleton was off doing his heroics. In the end they were there for 4 ½ months… It doesn’t look all that inviting, to be honest.

There’s an area between the large rock on the left and the smaller one in the centre which is a sort of cove.  The smaller rock was absolutely covered with penguins (the tiny flecks you can see below).

 

I should pay tribute to the navigation skills of the captain at this point, because, in order to give us passengers something extra to see, he gently let Hondius drift on the wind towards Point Wild, something that must take some nerve, as it’s probably expensive to get it wrong.  Anyway, that’s what he did, and we were able to get an eyeful of this special sight.

You have to look rather carefully to see it, but there it is;

a bust of Luis Pardo, who was the captain of a Chilean ship, Yelcho, which was the vessel which actually performed the rescue of the stranded men.

So, Kudos to the captain for his skill and daring, and it was out with the rum and hot chocolate as we passengers celebrated the memory of the kind of derring-do which marked out the heroic age of Antarctic exploration**.

Shortly after setting off again, we had our third and final elephantine encounter.

Can you see it in the photo above?  A thin grey line stretching from  horizon to horizon?

It’s an iceberg.

One, single, iceberg. A23a. The biggest iceberg currently extant.

It broke away from the ice shelf in 1986, was grounded and therefore stationary for some time, but is now floating freely at a speed of around 3 miles per day.

It’s unimaginably vast.  If you were to pick it up and pop it back down centred on Charing Cross (the middle of London as far as signposts are concerned), then I, for one, would be very cross, because it would crush my house. My house is in Surrey, 25 miles (40 km) to the south west.  So A23a is bigger than Greater London, covers a greater area than the M25.  Of course you can’t capture that in photos.  But here are a few, anyway.

It varies between 20 and 40 metres tall above the sea, which means that there’s some 300 metres of it below the water.

Mesmerising. Mind blowing. A privilege to see it.

What a day we’d had! Such sights and experiences!

There was some light relief available in the evening, as the staff staged a Film Night, with popcorn an’ everyfink.

The film was, of course, “Shackleton”, starring Kenneth Branagh, sporting a particularly heroic hairstyle.

And that was it for the day.  We’re headed along a similar track to Shackleton’s rescue mission, and so will eventually reach South Georgia. We have one stop en route where, conditions permitting, we’ll make landfall for the first time in a couple of days.  I’m hoping for benign weather conditions, and time, as ever, will tell…

 

 

* His rescue mission was, indeed, a heroic exploit and totally admirable.  Both Jane and I, however, regard the whole thing as an exemplar of How To Get On In Corporate Life: cock something up quite badly and then move mountains in a very obvious way to rescue the situation.  Management only remembers the heroics, not the cock-up.  Frankly, in our humble opinions, Shackelton should never have left South Georgia in the first place; the whalers there – and they knew this stuff – told him not to because of the dangers of particularly bad sea ice that year. He went ahead anyway, and that sea ice destroyed his ship, the less-than-ideally named Endurance.

** Less well-known was the other half of the Shackleton expedition.  Shackleton’s original objective was to cross the continent from one ocean to another (the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, actually).  He could take with him sufficient supplies to get him to the Pole, but needed further supplies for the other side of it.  To this end, a party of men set out from New Zealand to the Ross Sea end of Antarctica, to forge south towards the pole from there to drop supply depots for Shackleton’s second half.  This mission, although apparently successful in that it did drop three supply depots totalling a couple of tons of food, was a disaster – poorly-led, badly-planned and resulting in the deaths of three men. And, of course, ultimately pointless because Shackleton barely even got started before losing his ship. Such was the stuff of which men were made in those days.

Farewell, Antarctic Peninsula

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Wednesday 28 February 2024 – I have no idea what plan we’re up to, but the briefings that Pippa gives us every evening about the prospects for the following day make me believe that we’re working our way steadily through the alphabet as weather changes and conditions at potential landing sites become clearer.

The original plan for today had been a landing on D’Hainaut Island, where there are the remains of a whaling operation and, goodness me, some penguins, followed by a cruise around Mikkelsen Harbour. For those idiots hardy souls who wanted this, there was also the Polar Plunge – the opportunity to swim in the Antarctic Ocean.  On looking out of the cabin window first thing this morning, it was clear that the luck with the weather which had seen us through the first few days had really deserted us.

Winds were 25 knots.  I’m only passing familiar with the Beaufort wind scale, and I haven’t got Google to look it up for you; but I do know that a 30-knot wind is pretty much gale force 8.  The 25 knots that we did have was sufficient to ensure that the rain lashed more across than down. It was also sufficiently strong that the Zodiac cruise was cancelled. For Jane and me, the decision to have no part of the day’s expeditions was easily and swiftly made; after all, we’d seen a good number of gentoo penguins already and I wasn’t prepared to risk my Nikon in the persisting rain. Coffee in the lounge was a more attractive proposition. We could see the landing area

and even make out some detail of the whaling shed,

and that was good enough for us.  Jane spotted an iceberg with a face on it

and, as we departed D’Hainaut Island, vigorous use of the “clarify” slider on my image processing software revealed that there would have been a great view were it not for the fog.

And (again, courtesy of computer software) we caught what turned out to be our last glimpse of the Antarctic peninsula as we headed north

to exactly what, we weren’t sure, but we had been warned to expect some rougher seas as we went through the Bransfield Strait, which separates the South Shetlands and the Antarctic Peninsula.

During the afternoon, we had a couple of interesting lectures.  One from Meike about Antarctic Krill, the small, shrimp-like creatures which not only form a key link in the food chain, since just about all the local wildlife depend on them, but also operate a significant carbon sink as they feed on algae on the base of sea ice, then sink and deposit carbon on the sea bed in the form of their excretions.

The other was from Pelin, who expertly took us through one of the remarkable rescue stories of the heroic era of Antarctic exploration – the Norrskjöld expedition of 1901-03. This involved three exploration parties who had become separated from each other, each in a different area off the Antarctic Peninsula and state of distress (e.g ship destroyed by ice, being confined to a tent for months during an Antarctic winter, that kind of thing) setting off to try to find each other and, rather improbably, succeeding. Even more incredibly, a rescue ship, which had been dispatched (because the exploration ship hadn’t returned when it should have) with instructions to find them, even more improbably succeeded.  In all, a party of 20 men was saved, with only one death, probably from a chest infection.

After this, everyone eagerly awaited Pippa’s recap which would be the point at which we found out what was on the cards.

It was enlightening to listen to the process that Pippa and the team had gone through.  For example, the first thought was to go to the Antarctic Sound, at the tip of the Peninsula, to view some of what Otto Norrskjöld had seen on his expedition.

But the captain had seen the weather forecast

(hint: red and purple are the highest wind speeds) and said “no”, or more likely “nyet”.  Various other possibilities were discussed, but in all cases the winds were too strong.  And so we took our leave of the Antarctic Peninsula for the last time and headed out on our route towards Elephant Island

and more specifically to Point Wild

so named for reasons I will come to in the next post, but which has great historic and emotional significance for anyone who knows the Shackleton story.

The recap session also featured several short talks. Annelou spoke on the topic of the Antarctic ice, how it varies over the course of a year and how it ages in different ways.

Rose discussed the several versions of “South Pole” there are, starting with the obvious geographic south pole, which is where all the lines of longitude meet (altitude 2835m above sea level, the top 2.7 kilometres of which is ice);

and covering the other four (2 is the magnetic south pole, 3 the geomagnetic pole, whose explanation I couldn’t quite grasp and, of course, can’t easily Google), 4 the pole of inaccessibility (84° S,64° E), which is furthest from all of the coasts, and 5, the ceremonial south pole, where the flags of the 12 original sharing nations were erected but which has now moved with the ice away from the actual geographic south pole (I hope you are keeping up at the back…?).

Joyce discussed the heroic efforts of humpback whales to foil the killing exploits of orcas.  Apparently orcas can take humpback whale calves, and, unsurprisingly, humpbacks take the, erm, hump at this and have developed ways of chasing orcas away; this extends to orca attacks on other species, not just other whales.

The evening ended with an after-dinner presentation. Sasha, in his usual idiosyncratic and droll way, told us how his journey through life led to him being in the Antarctic after five years serving in Pyramiden, the Russian ghost town in the Arctic, via his first journey on a very idiosyncratic aircraft, the Ilyushin 76.

With the increasing pitching and rolling of Hondius indicating that we were in more open water, we headed for bed, with the enticing prospect of Elephant Island and more detail on the Shackleton story awaiting us in the morning.

 

 

Detaille Oriented

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Monday 26 February 2024 – The morning dawned somewhat greyer and rather windier than I would frankly have liked.

But the weather was still, equally frankly, a lot more benign than it might have been.  There were two items on the plan today, the first of which was a visit to a disused British research base dating from the 1940s, Base W, on Detaille Island.  From the warmth of our cabin we saw the teams headed out to prepare a landing area

and if you know where to look, you can see the base in the picture above.  There it is, top left. You can see it more clearly below.

Our Orange group was due to do a short Zodiac cruise before making the landing, and we were hosted for that by the very droll Sasha.  The conditions weren’t great – 0°C, a little snowy drizzle in the air and just windy enough to make things a little uncomfortable – but we saw, as ever, some great icescapes

and a reasonably substantial colony of Adelie penguins.

Many of them were milling about by the water’s edge

and Sasha explained that what was going on was a sort of group negotiation about getting into the water. An individual going in might be caught by a passing predator, but if a group could all go in at the same time, individual chances of survival were better; so it was a game of “after you, Claude”, “no, after you, Cecil”.  This groupthink actually resulted in none of them going in whilst we were watching, which is a bit of a shame. One solitary penguin seemed to be trying to tell us something

but we don’t know what, since we don’t speak penguin (I wonder if it’s related to pidgin…?).

After a bit more desultory cruising, we made our landing on the island

and stumbled up a somewhat icy path to the hut that housed the main part of the base.

We had a short history briefing from Pelin as we stood outside the entrance.

She explained a little about the geopolitical games which surrounded the establishment of these research bases, but the idea mainly was to establish territorial rights before some other buggers got in and tried it on.  The first British base was Base A, and so you can work out that Base W was established some time later, sometime in the late 1940s.  It didn’t last long, as a really harsh winter forced an evacuation, which was carried out via a 30-kilometre dog sled pull across sea ice to Base Y (Base W actually had some 20 working dogs – more than the number of personnel – which were housed in separate kennels). The harsh conditions started to destroy the buildings and they have been only relatively recently excavated from the snow which had engulfed them, lovingly restored by volunteers and established as a historic site.  Clearly, as such, it has to be treated with respect, and no more than 12 people are allowed in at any one time.  But one can go in and inside it’s like a time capsule.

After spending time looking around inside the hut, we walked a little up the hillside to take in the overall view, which was spectacular, if somewhat difficult to capture in a single image.

Then we stumbled and slipped our way back down to the landing area

to take a ride back to Hondius. It was by this stage snowing reasonably obviously, and the wind had got up a little more, so we declined the option of a further Zodiac cruise in favour of a hot chocolate and a bit of a sit down.

After lunch, at which we had a really interesting chat with Judy and Knox, a North American couple who had lived and worked in China in the 1990s, the original plan had been to go to Hanusse Bay for a further look-round.  But the prevailing conditions didn’t make that a particularly inviting prospect,

so Pippa and the team decided to start heading back Oop Narth to cross back over the Antarctic Circle and head to our next place instead. It’s not, at this very moment, completely clear where that will be, but I’m sure it will be worth the wait; and in any case, after all the relentless expeditioning of the last days, it was nice to have an afternoon off.

We visited the bridge, which is an oasis of calm

even as quite a lot of attention has to be paid to not bumping into things as we go.

We were also able to pick up the certificates which proved that we’d crossed the Antarctic Circle.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring?  At the moment, not I, but you can be sure that I’ll let you know what actually happened as soon as circumstances permit.