122 Days Later...

What blog? For those of you who follow this dusty ol' rhyme from the high seas (ahem, mom), I apologize for the recent lack of new words and thoughts 'round here. The rocking of the ship, coupled with my own carelessness caused a coffee spill a few cruises ago and a few essential letters on my keyboard have since gone kaput and never came back. I've nonetheless devised a way to type, but it takes a long time and, well, I'm lazy.

Anyway, that's not important. What is important is that today, this moment right here, wherein I'm sitting in a cafe, eating a pizza, drinking a cafe doble, I am basking in the still novel feeling that I am done. It's over. Fin. Koncheelos. If this were a normal turnover day, new passengers would be arriving in fifteen minutes, but it's not. When I go back to the ship for the last time tonight it will be to celebrate and say farewell to those I got to know over the past four months.

Boy, we had fun. Copious laughter, a couple tears, some bruises, a flying fish, a storm, a marriage proposal, many birthdays, a Christmas, a polar plunge, and a heart-shaped Valentine's Day cake that was literally the frosting on my entire season. Retrospect is already starting to kick in, painting my memories a warm orangey hue of sunset.

And now, after catering to eleven cruises full of vacationers its my turn to escape a routine that was escape to so many others. I will not miss spending ten hours a day every day behind that little bar, but Antarctica, well, I can't wait to see her again.

A Hurricane and a Harbinger of Nostalgia

Voyage 8 - January 25 – Febrary 12

I have never in my life felt so vulnerable as I did on the night of February the fourth. We were sailing southwest, towards the South Orkney Islands from South Georgia, that is, until a meteorological report came in complete with a hurricane warning. The seas in the direction we were heading had ten-meter swells. Ten meters. Something like thirty-six feet. Needless to say, we changed our course for the opposite direction. The hurricane was going to do one of two things: It was going to head south and completely miss us or go north, towards us, and bring its ten-meter swells and one hundred and twenty kilometer winds with it. Nobody knew what was going to happen. I could hear it in the concern in our expedition leader’s voice and I saw it in the way we went to all lengths to secure everything on the ship.

I lay in bed that night thinking about a lot of things. I thought about how hurricanes destroy cities. I thought about our little tiny open top lifeboats. I was aware of every movement of the ship, wondering if every wave we hit was a harbinger of worse things to come. When I would drift off to sleep my dreams would immediately magnify the rolling and I would awaken again in a panic. My ship is a good ship, but obviously not invincible. I thought about the six-meter swells from Christmas Eve, and tried to imagine what sailing through peaks and valleys of ten meters would feel like. I thought about my bar and suddenly was convinced I’d left glasses lying around, so I got up, ostensibly to double check everything, but really I think I needed to walk around and see passengers who weren’t worried like I was. There was indeed a couple still up, playing cards. Seeing their nonchalance and the quizzical look on their faces to see me puttering around my bar at two in the morning helped to calm me. I went back to my cabin and fell asleep and when I woke up I learned that the storm had gone south, away from us.

When our passengers hear about the storm we weathered on Christmas Eve a common question I get asked is whether or not I was scared. The question has always surprised me. Why would I worry? This boat has been sailing through the Drake Passage for years. There is a tourism industry built around sailing people through these stormy waters. Sure, we rolled 38 degrees, but the ship can handle at least 45 degrees of roll before she’s in danger of not being able to right herself. It was an eventful evening, chaotic, and a little bit exciting, but scary? Nah. It took the night of the hurricane warning to remind me of how were not invincible out here. I mean, there was a time when a solitary iceberg sank a certain unsinkable ship. Shit happens.

I’m certainly not saying that I would ever be deterred by these realizations to come back out here – no way. I’ve discovered a new species of happiness on the Lyubov Orlova that I suspect has been well known by seafaring men since the dawn of marine travel – kind of like tasting curry for the first time in rural Minnesota. What I am saying is that I’ve come to respect the sea. It has the power to swallow us whole.

But this is just me getting introspective in the face of a hurricane just like I’m getting introspective about the inevitability of certain things coming to an end such as this season or, more abstractly, eras. The end of the season is one thing. A time will soon come where a day such as I’ve had today, where I looked out my porthole to see two humpback whales swim by in the morning and jumped off the gangway into the sea in the afternoon (it was a particularly good day and my hair still smells like saltwater) will no longer be possible. Fun. So, so, much fun. As I head into my last month down here I can already feel what Gabriel Garcia Marquez calls the insidious trap of nostalgia kicking in. But the nostalgia I will feel for this ship is going to be particularly potent because I’ve just been told of the end of an aforementioned era. Yes, the Lyubov Orlova is being retired from the Quark Fleet. It had to happen. This sluggish beast with her rust and her chinks is being put to pasture. I can say for certain that when I disembark this ship in one month, it will be for the last time.

I’ve made some pretty fantastic memories on this ship. There was the night in the Arctic where us kids drunkenly jumped into the pool with our clothes on. The first and last time I ate raw whale. There was New Years Eve, midnight sun and peaceful icebergs dotting a calm pinkish blue sea. And the night where the galley boys, gift shop girl, and myself decided to shoot jager at nine pm and we ended up dancing to Rihanna behind my bar with a fifty year old Jewish woman. The Lyubov Orlova’s birthday, letting one of the Russian waitresses behind my bar to shoot vodka and watching helplessly as she barfed on my beer fridge. The hot July afternoon we spent anchored off of Churchhill getting suntans and watching belugas swim around the boat. Jetlagged and wandering her empty halls in Tenerife. Earning my sea legs. And, of course, the Christmas Eve storm of aught nine.

I have one month to go before I move out, move on, and spend some time happily aimless and unemployed. I’m looking forward to spring, vacation, and whatever summer has in store for me, but you know what? For once I feel as though somehow the grass is sufficiently green right here in these icy landscapes.

The Clipper and the Corpse

Voyage 7 – January 16th – 25th

Lyubov Orlova Asst Hotel Manager (Eric): “I got an email from the Hotel Manager of the Clipper today. They found a dead body on their ship. A passenger.”

Me: “Oh my god! [Or something along those lines] How did it happen?”

Eric: “She was old. Her son was on the ship.”

Me: “So they’re sailing back to port?”

Eric: “No. They’re sailing the cruise as normal. They put her in the fridge.”

Me: ?!

Eric: “Maritime law. If you find a body on your ship, you put it in the fridge.”

The perennial question I’ve tried to tackle in these writings is, ‘what is life like here?’ I’ve attempted in almost every post but yet I’m still not sure I know how to answer this question. Where do I start? Should I describe an average day? Should I let myself go on a tangent of useless complaints? Is there something on land that I can compare it to?

The hotel manager of one of Quark’s other ships, the Clipper, found a body in one of the cabins this week. A passenger had passed away from natural causes. Upon hearing about it though, I had to wonder what would we would do here on the Lyubov Orlova if somebody died in the middle of the cruise? I got my answer from Eric. The cruise would continue on as normal and we would store the body in the most hygienic place – the fridge – until we arrived in Ushuaia and the deceased could be shipped home. The thought of storing a body in a galley fridge struck me as silly at first, but really it makes sense. What else would we do?

I share this snippet of conversation because I think it might capture a little bit of the spirit of the world I live in. Here we have to make do with what is immediately available to us, be it a specific protocol to follow or the conversion of a fridge in the galley to a makeshift morgue, and it makes us creative.

Usually, for the day-to-day course of events what is needed is something simple, like a Russian galley chef who happens to cut hair or iceberg ice when the ice machine is broken.
The Russian sailors also make do with what they have. A specific example that affects me is their craftiness in fulfilling their need to get drunk. They’re not allowed any alcohol on the ship, yet somehow this season they keep getting their hands on beer. What’s worse, they keep getting their hands on not just any beer, but my beer. Since the beginning of the season they’ve figured out a number of ways to break into my storage spaces: they’ve jimmied the door off of one of my padlocked fridges, completely torn off the latch of a locked closet, and taken a counter completely off of one of my bars in order to get at the alcohol inside.

As it turns out, their success in getting my alcohol usually ends up being a recipe for absurdity, case in point:

One night this cruise the Russian crew’s doctor and the crew’s head stewardess went on quite the bender. The doctor was found half-naked on deck seven wielding a knife in the middle of the night. I have no idea what she was after, but apparently she had an axe to grind about something. After the knife incident I found the stewardess lounging across the buffet table like a mermaid, picking sugar packets out of their bowls and drunkenly inspecting them, one by one. I don’t know why. But I also don’t know why not. Why not? is a question I ask a lot here and I find a certain gratification in the fact that I can almost never find a suitable answer for it.

Furthermore, in consequence of the Russian crew’s Macguyver tactics to get at my alcohol, the space where I am able to store my liquor keeps getting smaller and smaller as time goes on, which in turn means that we all have to get resourceful. For example, we considered moving one of my tampered-with fridges into a different, more secure room, but the fridge was just too big to fit through the door, so now it is unplugged and used as a storage for something the Russians can’t get drunk off of: Bulk printer paper.

So I suppose that’s kind of what life is like here. If I find a body I put it in the fridge and if I can’t use a fridge for beer storage I’ll use it to store office supplies.

Why not.

The Mid-Season Blues

Voyage 6 – January 7th through January 16th

There are so many ways to count down the time here. First, I can count the days. I have sixty remaining until the last day of the last cruise, March 12. This means that as I write this I am directly at mid season - a small holiday, we have just made it over the hump. No cause for a big celebration, but enough reason to raise a scotch. I can also count the weeks. I have roughly eight left. Eight is a much smaller number than sixty, but I find it difficult to think in terms of weeks. There are no days of the week here. Monday versus Friday versus Saturday is all a formality. For example, today is Wednesday, but to me it is my last day to access the hold before we enter the Drake Passage and seas become too rough to safely go out on the bow. Other important days are BBQ Day, Farewell and Welcome Cocktail Days, Turnover Days, Sea Days, days when I make landings and days when I hibernate.

I can count the months, but I’d rather not. Two gone, two to go, but I have no real conception of it, as they pass as slowly here as they do anywhere.

My favorite way to whittle away the time is to think of it in terms of cruises. We are on cruise number six out of eleven. Each new cruise brings a new group of people, and each new group of people alters the environment of the ship in their own way. Cruises last, with a couple exceptions, nine or ten days, and the only time when I really pay attention to the date is Turnover Day. Therefore, when I count in cruises, my time moves forward like this: I leave Ushuaia, note the date is January 7. I start a new cruise, get to know a new set of people, cross the Drake, mix some drinks, visit the peninsula again, cross the Drake northbound, then we are back in Ushuaia and it is all of a sudden January 16. I will do it all again and January will almost be over, poof, just like that.

Thus, I have 60 days, eight weeks, five cruises, two months, 1,440 hours until it is time to say good-bye to Terra Incognita. If I were on Scott’s Polar Journey, we would have just made it to the Pole and now we’d be sledging back to Cape Evans.

But I’m not sledging. I’m cruising.

Why am I thinking like this? Why am I counting down the days? I’m one of the thirty thousand people on average who get the chance to come to Antarctica per year, and further, one of a much smaller number that is lucky enough to do it over and over again.

But I have indeed gotten the blues and I have to admit that there is a definitive reason why: Last cruise sucked. Actually, the cruise itself was great. The passengers had a great time. But this group, man, they worked me hard, nonstop, for almost three weeks. They partied, in rough seas or calm. I didn’t have enough glassware to accommodate for their love of margaritas. I stayed open late most nights for them. We moved my bar twice to host dance parties. We celebrated New Year’s together. They were still going at three in the morning when I finally decided to do last call. Christmas Eve, while the ship was listing thirty to forty degrees from side to side, a small group of them decided to party. I was drunkenly decreed a hero. All of this was great as far as revenue is concerned, but it was all terribly exhausting, and while in the middle of it I couldn’t figure out why I was becoming so miserable.

Don’t get me wrong – the people were, for the most part, wonderful. I forged some friendships that will outlive our time on the ship, and part of the reason they were so great was that they loved to party – a catch 22, I suppose.

This cruise I’ve been given the benefit of hindsight and it all makes sense. If I wasn’t behind my bar, chances were I was sleeping, which in turn meant that if I was awake I was probably behind my bar. I was caught in a vortex of serving and mixing and stocking. It is a vortex certain to make anyone save maybe Tom Cruise in Cocktail crazy.

It sucked, yes, but I’ve been reading a lot about this area’s early explorers and really, I don’t have it so bad. I’m not trudging through -70 F temperatures and 100 mph winds to collect an emperor penguin egg like certain people I have been reading about as of late. I still have all my fingers and toes and I have never had to fight off a leopard seal, or an Orca for that matter. Yeah, I had to work a busy bar while the ship rocked violently, but at least I didn’t have to stand up to my knees in brackish coal water bailing her out, praying she wasn’t going to sink. Nor have I ever had to stand by with my coworkers and six crying emperor penguins, watching her slowly and tortuously get crushed by ice, not knowing if I would ever to see home again.

This is the trouble I run into with reading the history of Antarctic exploration while down here; I can’t stop comparing my challenges to the he problems faced by Shackleton. If nothing else, it puts my problems into perspective. Or, more accurately, I think it might strip the perspective away completely. Some of these men really should have died doing what they did. I work in the tourism industry.

About this same time during my first tenure on the Lyubov Orlova I started to feel the blues as well. I yearned for a kitchen, some control over simple daily aspects of my life, perhaps a day off. I missed the city, my friends, streetcars, and bookstores. Then the season finally ended, a year passed by, and lo and behold, I started to miss the ship.

I remember starting my bartending job in the Yukon last summer. It was in a hotel, and strangely a similar environment to the ship in a lot of ways, except of course it didn’t sail around. When I walked down the hallways of the Westmark, I kept expecting handrails to hold onto. I kept expecting the hall to slowly start lilting back and forth. I remember feeling these momentary pangs of panic behind the bar when I saw how precariously the glassware just, well, sat there on the shelf. I felt the need to pack it all into a small space, secure it, so it wouldn’t go flying if we hit a wave. But of course we wouldn’t hit a wave, seeing as we weren’t at sea. Sure enough, I was always disappointed by this realization.

I couldn’t believe it. I actually missed the sea. Thus, I was drawn back in.

It is an addictive life out here. Of course I have shitty days. One thing I can always count on out here and that is the lack of control I have over pretty much anything. I open the fridge and pop will fly out. Drinks are constantly spilling. Storage rooms are trashed every time we cross the Drake Passage.

But then there are the days where I sit with my coworkers out on deck. We drink tea and lie in hammocks while the sun shines down and nothing but blue sea surrounds us. These are the moments will remember when time passes and I’m back on land.

I won’t remember the blues. I will remember the sea. I won’t remember the smell of rotten Sprite (identical to barf), but I will remember the humpback whales, rolling and playing around the ship at sunset off the coast of the Peninsula.

I will forget the crappy coffee, the nonstop work, the exhaustion, but I certainly will remember the elation of knowing what it is like to have no address, but not be homeless.

We're Making Mythical the Mundane Today

Voyage 5 – December 20 through January 7

What a weird and wonderful place I am in. I’ve spent the past three weeks sailing to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island, the Antarctic Peninsula, and back to Ushuaia. I have hung out with sheep that were hanging out with penguins, I have weathered my first storm at sea and I have tiptoed past angry and lethargic seals to get to Ernest Shackleton’s grave. I have watched hundreds of penguins mill around a white sand beach. I’ve seen the beauty of our surroundings bring tears to the eyes of a grown man. I’ve hung out with seal pups in the rain. As I’ve mentioned before, my existence down here is a mixture of ordinary with a dash of bizarre, but this cruise is different. This cruise I feel as though I’ve fallen through the looking glass.

On December 22nd I sat on a green rolling hill above a white sand beach on Saunders Island, in the Falklands, where penguins roamed with sheep on sloping green hills. Out in the water about nine black and white dolphins spent the afternoon flirting with our zodiaks and over yonder Vladimir, one of our zodiak drivers was swimming in the ocean. I, on the other hand, was appropriately bundled up for a windy sub-arctic spring day. It dawned on me at this moment how fitting this unlikely scene was. Just like the sheep hanging out with penguins, I was hanging out on an Antarctic white sand beach on the Falkland Islands. It was Christmastime, and somehow summer solstice had just happened.

Christmas Eve was the night of my first storm at sea. In technical terms it was a nine of the Beaufort Scale. Winds were 55-60 knots, waves were six meters, and the ship was swaying twenty to twenty five degrees. In human terms I can only attempt to describe the scene on the ship: My job was to right tables that had slid across the library and pick up broken miscellaneous things that would fly when we would hit waves. It wasn’t long before the decision was made to take all unsecured furniture and stack it in the gym where it had less of a chance to fly around and hurt people. It was during this process a particularly massive wave hit the ship, causing it to sway a full thirty degrees. It was all I could do to just hold on where I was standing, listen to the sounds of crashing all around, and hope that nothing important was being destroyed. Now, I’ve never been in an earthquake, but I can only imagine that after this wave struck I have a relatively accurate idea of what one must feel like. In this monster wave a fridge fell over, a range came completely out of the wall in the galley, one hundred caprese salads flew off the buffet table and onto the floor in the dining room, and a woman broke a rib. Dinner service was canceled and we delivered meals to passengers in their cabins. An additional obstacle in our night was that the storm caused an oil spill in the galley, making our trips down to pick up meals an exercise in waiting for the ship to tilt the right direction so we could skate from point A to point B, because taking a proper step was no longer possible. Lastly, although our expedition leader strongly urged passengers to stay safely in their cabins, many decided that this night was the perfect time to get trashed, so I was busy serving customers throughout all of this. Needless to say, this Christmas Eve left me exhausted.

Christmas Day this year meant a series of things. A staff party and gift exchange. The closest thing to a night off I will get in one hundred and twenty two days. A new blue toque: I’m told that with this toque on I am stylish in Europe. A rare starry night sky. So many Christmas cookies followed by a Christmas cookie stomach ache. Christmas carols in my bar. Watching the relative youngins’ dance to Lady GaGa while I sat and talked about the good old days with the ship’s historian. No snow, no turkey, no month-long inundation with All Things Christmas. In fact, it was only a few days before the 25th when it dawned on me that ‘tis the season.

Then, as Christmas passed us by we reached the remote, sub-Antarctic menagerie of South Georgia Island. South Georgia Island is a place where King Penguins congregate by the thousands, fur seals take over old whaling stations, reindeer hang out with elephant seals, and deep green grass climbs rolling hills. It was, about a century ago, the heart of the whaling industry. It lies in the middle of the Southern Ocean, two and a half days’ sail from the Falkland Islands. It is an unassuming on a map but stunningly beautiful in real life.

On December 28th we sailed to a place called Grytvicken, on South Georgia Island. I’ve never imagined there could be a place in the world quite like this. A Norwegian whaler named Carl Larsen first discovered the site. The first time he sailed into the bay he found it absolutely teeming with whales. It wasn’t long before the site became the most industrious whaling station in the world, exporting whale products to England that were to become everything from fuel for streetlamps to make up, perfume and corsets. There was a time when a whopping nine hundred and twenty people called this place home and a walk on the beach would have been a walk from whale carcass to whale carcass.

Grytvicken is nestled on three sides by mountains and on one by a narrow bay. A solitary gravel path weaves past a church, a whalers’ cemetery, a museum, shipwrecks, and rusted remnants of whaling machinery. Elephant seals and King penguins have since taken over and pepper the landscape.

Ernest Shackleton is buried here and during our visits to Grytvicken we do a toast of rum at his grave. The path up to the whalers’ cemetary is a scene straight out of a Tolkien novel. I walked the short path up a fairly steep grassy hill, rutted with small pools of water that reflected sunshine. Lying out in the sun by the dozen were elephant and fur seals, so numerous that I had to weave a careful path around them. Some of the seals took no concern of my presence, but others would hiss and grunt and gnash their teeth if I came too close; it was honestly scary. Some of them would even start at me, as if to attack. It was almost as if they had made themselves the de facto gatekeepers of the whalers’ cemetery.

The place is unreal. If there was a spot in the world the deserved to be called mythical, Grytvicken is it.

I spent my New Years Eve at sea. During the day we sailed through an ice field. There was no wind and the sun shone brilliantly. There was nary a cloud in the sky. The scenery was so stunning that a passenger came up to me with tears in his eyes and ordered a glass of champagne. The landscape brought to mind a quote by a man named Frank Worsley who sailed a little ship called the Endurance through these same waters some ninety years ago:

“Many of the tabular bergs appear like huge warehouses and grain elevators, but more look like the creations of some brilliant architect when suffering from delerium…”

At midnight we toasted with champagne at the top of the ship. We were somewhere off the coast of Coronation Island and the sea was as still as a lake.

The New Years’ party was raucous. One man slept with a glass of champagne in his hand at the end of the night, another drunkenly made out with two different girls within a half hour on the dance floor, and a trio of Dutch passengers did this dancing, yelping, drum circle thing in the smoking area of the ship. One of them was even dancing up the wall somehow.

At one in the morning the Russians put on their annual play. It is a tradition here that every New Year after midnight, in the Russian crew mess, just for themselves and ship staff, they will put on a show. Apparently this year’s production was an homage to a series of Russian fairy tales, but to me it seemed more like a Christmas/Slavic Alice in Wonderland. It featured a man wearing a log cabin throughout the play, a knight in shining armour, a few witches, and a heroine that would intermittently lip sync Russian pop music. Our assistant hotel manager had a cameo as what I could only guess was an eccentric billionaire. He appeared onstage dressed all in white, in a wheelchair, and wearing sunglasses with red and green blinking lights on them. He asked for a glass of water, died, and end scene. Then, to culminate, a juggling penguin, a reindeer, and the cottage all came out and danced to a techno version of jingle bells.
It was bizarre, albeit jolly way to usher in 2010.

Finally, at four in the morning, when the party was over and almost everybody was in bed, I had a moment to myself. I sat at the very top of the stairs on the very top of the ship and watched the lazy curving wake left by the Lyubov Orlova in the sunrise-lit bluish orangey sea as it sailed through those beautiful madhouse icebergs.

There is a Czech superstition that maintains that a person’s year will reflect the qualities of the New Year’s Eve that proceeds it, and why not? If there is a grain of truth to this belief…well, I don’t know what to think.

Right now we’re sailing back up the Beagle Channel towards Ushuaia and I’m suffering from a bit of the mid-season blues. I’ve got two months behind me; enough to be sick of what I’m sick of, and two months ahead of me; enough time for it all to seem like it will never end. Wonderland is an exhausting place but that’s okay, life at sea was never supposed to be easy.

The Orange Awnings of Southern Summers

Voyage 4 – December 11th through the 20th

Once upon a time Lyubov Orlova was a Soviet film star. She made her career in silent films, she worked through the Communist era, and Josef Stalin was a fan. Now she is a polar expedition sailing vessel. She has two sister ships, one of them also chartered by Quark, which is today named the Clipper Adventurer. The third sister may or may not be sailing. Nobody seems to know. In the Quark brochure the Clipper is described as “elegant” while my ship is kindly bestowed the euphemism “sporty.” Last night my sporty vessel was compared to a cantankerous old lady, but I will get to that later.

This is the second season I’ve called the Lyubov Orlova my home and over time I’ve become quite familiar with all of her nooks and crannies. This year I sleep in cabin 601, and I’m grateful for this because although the beds are narrow and the storage space is nil, my windows open to let in fresh air. This fact means a lot to me because I remember all too well how stuffy life is on the lower decks. Quality of sleep can differ greatly depending on which cabin you have been bestowed. I know how dramatically the cabins near the bow crash on the waves and how violently cabins on 600 and 700 deck lilt to and fro when at sea and how much the cabins on the crew side smell like cigarette smoke. I know the slow creaking groan the ship makes as she sways along open water; I listen to it every night while falling asleep.

I am familiar with the way she moves. When she rolls to the right, I automatically move to the left. I have learned to walk at an angle to accommodate for her lilts. I’ve even learned how to jog on her decks while at sea.

I depend on my Lyubov Orlova. It is her halls that I walk, her stairs that I climb, in her bar where I work. She is at once my best friend and my worst enemy. She in many ways behaves like a starlet: She is strikingly beautiful, perfectly photogenic, unreliable, unpredictable, prone to terrible mood swings, yet she manages to retain a certain ineffable charm. She is at once my castle, my shack, my key to the world, and my prison.

My home weighs 4,251 tons and she really is a beauty. She is a deep navy blue, with white trim and white smokestacks. Across her bow, stern and sides is emblazoned the name Lyubov Orlova. If you look carefully you can see the remnants of her former lettering in Cyrillic. She arches out of the water with an increasing breadth, she is massive when you stand next to her. She is a rough and tumble boat. If you look closely at carpentry, the décor, or the steel structure itself, it is obvious that she was assembled with pragmatism in mind rather than luxury. That being said when she is sailing through straits and fjords at the end of the world, you can stand at the very top of the ship and watch the world go by from an unbeatable vantage point - kinda like riding in a colossal floating convertible.

The inside my ship is chalk full of kitsch. The cabins sport the strangest paintings of stallions and tabby cats, racehorses, Polynesian women, even a portrait of Lyubov herself, rising above the ship, her hair flowing and full of daisies. It is just magnifique.

Some would describe the décor in my bar as gauche, but I think I would call it ‘faux luxe’. The walls are a fake wood paneling and the upholstery is a deep emerald green and gold stripe, never mind the fact that about three booths are broken. It adds to the charm. And there is a great mural of the actress throughout her career on the wall accompanied by a short bio in terrible English. Really, it has just the right amount of dive. Add a jukebox and a couple cases of Labatt 50 and my bar would play well in Toronto.

Although she is a beautiful boat, she is absurdly unreliable. An example of this that has recently affected us is the recurring problem of one of her engines going down. She is meant to run on two engines, giving her a maximum cruising speed at her age and in her condition of about 11 knots. (Somewhere just under 22 kmh.) At this speed she can cross the Drake Passage in about two days, allowing for our standard four-sea-day-five-peninsula-day cruises. That works wonderfully unless she goes down to one engine. This obviously cuts her cruising speed in half. Just on the way down to the Peninsula during this cruise we were grimly looking at the prospect of having to cut our peninsula time in half on a cruise that is already only nine days long as opposed to the standard ten. But our fickle lady has been repaired, again, we’ve made up for lost time and the cruisers never knew their vacation was in jeopardy. Nevertheless, this is a problem that has been recurring since I’ve known her. This engine of hers is kind of like a bum leg. Most of the time she runs fine with it, but when it goes, it really cripples us.

Recently I had an interesting conversation about the Lyubov Orlova with one of our senior staff members, wherein he likened her to an old lady and there really is no better way to describe her. She gets tired. She gets cranky. She is arthritic. She can’t be pushed too hard. Something about her is usually broken at any given time. Yesterday we had a flood in our galley. Sometimes our drinking water is a rusty yellow-red. Other times fridges stop working. In the span of one afternoon in my cabin two lights stopped working and my shower flooded the hallway. Our toilet system loves to break down. It frequently gets backed up and every once in awhile this phenomenon is accompanied to the scent of sewage. How many years does she have left in her? Educated opinion seems to be about one. One year. Maybe two. Then what will happen to her? From what I understand, there are a few possibilities: She will either move to a different market, perhaps become a ferry in the Philippines, or she will be sold for scrap metal in India. It’s also possible that she will sink, either in a real accident or for insurance money.

As far as ships go, the Lyubov Orlova is my first love. Picturing her at the bottom of the ocean is hard for me to do when I’m lounging in my cabin, grinning at the tabby cat on my wall. Oh Lyubov, you cranky old bat; you smell, you hobble, you are in a constant state of disrepair, but I love ya. When you are no longer sailing the ocean blue, you will be missed.

And that is my Lyubov. This is me.

Science visited our boat last week in the form of a flying fish. It’s body, about ten inches long with bulbous eyes as big as its head and an impressive wingspan was found on the top deck when we were in Ushuaia. It’s now being kept in the freezer of our galley and apparently it is two very interesting things: Thousands and thousands of miles out of its natural habitat and of a taxonomy of flying fish that the science world currently has very little information about. Apparently the Natural History Museum of New Zealand wants it. Huh.

I’m finishing up my fourth visit to the peninsula and I looking forward to the next cruise. We will finally get a different itinerary. Not that the Antarctic Peninsula isn’t a fantastic place, but I’m admittedly starting to become jaded to this magnificent scenery. In a testament to the insatiable nature of humankind, I need a new fix. The next cruise is 18 days long and we sail to the Falklands and South Georgia Island, a place that I have been repeatedly told is la crème de la crème in it’s beauty. It is also the place where the legendary Ernest Shackleton is buried. We do a toast of rum at his grave. I’ve recently learned that there exists a subgroup of Shackleton superfans out there who come on these cruises and actually prepare speeches for these toasts and passengers have been known to start crying outright. Yes, please!

Christmas has never snuck up on me like it did this year. It is already the 20th of December and last time I checked it was over a month away. Nevertheless, thanks to an issue of Time magazine that a passenger brought on board, I seem to have gotten a small and wonderful Christmas surprise. I have just read that Vladimir Nabokov, my favorite writer and architect of the most wickedly luscious sentences that I’ve ever come across has just had fragments of his last unfinished novel posthumously published by his son Dmitri. The work is entitled The Original of Laura, or, Dying is Fun, and consists of copies of the index cards he used to compose the novel along with their transcriptions. The only question now is how I get my grubby mitts on it down here.

And as a parting thought, after the next cruise we will be well into January, marching up to the halfway point of the season already. In some ways the time just seems to shuffle along like a puttering old man. Everyone once in awhile a coworker will quip something like, “87 days to go!” and inside my head the thoughts, “87 days may as well be one hundred million years when it comes to this stupid boat crap” start and I become cantankerous and start to run on only one engine myself…other times I have to wonder how the days can drift by in such a way that I don’t notice until their gone. Four trips have already gone by like nothing. I’m celebrating another summer solstice tomorrow. Expedition staff has left that I probably will never see again. Christmas will come and go, and 2009 will become 2010, just like that.

But life is like this wherever we are, isn’t it?

We Sail, We Sail, We Sail, on Seas full of Monsters

Voyage 3 - December 1 through December 11

I will always remember that the first time I saw a humpback whale my fingers smelled of cloves. I waited, watching the stillness of the bay, then the surface of the water would start to quiver, and up would come this magnificent black creature, the silence would be broken by the rush of seawater and air – the sound of its exhale, and down it would go. The water would once again become still, and once again, we would wait. Most of the time the whale remained amorphous, but every so often it would show off its perfect whale tail. The sea is silent, but full of monsters.

But I digress, for I do not intend to write about myself this time. Everything in my world remains the same: This week’s Russian foible involved our ship hitting another ship in Ushuaia, our first iceberg sighting cleared out the dining room rather than the bar, the vomiters still vomit, my dreams are still funny, my bar is still open, and my bell curve still applies. But it is my impressions of Antarctica that are evolving as I’m learning about the history of Antarctic exploration and just how much of a beast this land can be.

I’m reading a book right now, a memoir actually, superlatively titled The Worst Journey in the World by a man named Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Cherry was part of a British team of Antarctic explorers led by Robert Falcon Scott who attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1910. The history itself is unbelievable, but here I will unfortunately relay only a pitifully short and simple version: Not long after Scott announced his intentions to mount a scientific and exploratory mission to reach the South Pole, another explorer, Norway’s Roald Amundson, assembled a team of nineteen men and revealed his own his own plans to voyage to the same place, thus making man’s first expedition to the South Pole a race. Scott’s journey was mottled by pitfalls caused by sheer circumstance as well as lack of preparation: a majority of their ponies and dogs died of starvation and disease, food was scarce, the ice was unpredictable, blizzards rampaged – it was a tragedy of errors. They made it to the pole a mere 34 days after Amundson, who, much more comfortable with the challenges of polar exploration, had made the trek seem almost effortless. Unfortunately, Scott, Bowers, Oates, Wilson, and Taylor did not make it back to base camp alive. Bowers was the first to perish after suffering a head injury and falling into a coma. Oates, apparently aware of his own grave condition, left the tent on the morning of his thirty-second birthday and wandered into a blizzard after informing the others that ‘there was something he had to do and he might be awhile.’ He was never seen again. The last three froze to death only eleven miles short of their provisions depot. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was part of the search party that found their bodies, long after cold and starvation had killed them.

It sounds like I am weaving a dark tale, and it is, but what is absorbing about this book is the minutiae. For example, I will share with you, because it made me laugh out loud, how these men celebrated winter solstice:

“…Bowers brought in a wonderful Christmas tree, made of split bamboos and a ski stick, with feathers tied to the end of each branch, candles, sweets, preserved fruits, and the most absurd toys of which Bill was the owner. Titus got three things which pleased him immensely, a sponge, a whistle, and a popgun which went off when he pressed the butt. For the rest of the evening he went round asking whether you were sweating. ‘No.’ ‘Yes you are,’ he said, and wiped your face with the sponge. ‘If you want to please me very much you will fall down when I shoot you,’ he said to me, and then he went round shooting everybody. At intervals he blew the whistle…As we turned in he said, ‘Cherry, are you responsible for your actions?’ and when I said Yes, he blew loudly on his whistle, and the last thing I remembered was that he woke up Meares to ask him whether he was fancy free. It was a magnificent bust.”

I think I really like this Titus. He seems like a fun guy. To make use of Cherry’s own words – beg, borrow, or steal this tale. It is enthralling.

Today we on the Lyubov Orlova skirt only the very edges of this vast, ornery, screaming cold continent, to the gates of what has been described by explorers of the past as Hell on Earth. Our passengers go on zodiac cruises through ice fields, invigorate themselves by plunging into polar waters, spend afternoons among icebergs and gentoo penguins, and visit places such as “most southerly gift shops in the world” – all of this a mere century after Scott plunged headfirst into the depths of this godforsaken continent, to the South Pole, to his death. My experience with Antarctica is diametrically opposite the misery Scott and his men went through 99 years ago. For example, they noshed on cans of ground meat and lard, cocoa, dry biscuits and sugar while I eat filet of salmon and baked Alaska. I sleep in a warm bed, but Scott had to thaw his sleeping bag every night before he could even lay down to rest. Nevertheless, dare I say we who pleasure cruise have two very important things in common with these explorers of yore: We share an insatiable curiosity as well as the fact that we are at the mercy of the same Great White Unpredictable Continent.

Even today, with our technological advances, knowledge of the area, and prowess of the land that has allowed us to achieve commercial tourism, things can go wrong and they regularly do. Everybody down here has a story.

In my opinion, the crown jewel mishap of recent times was the sinking of the MS Explorer in 2007 in the Bransfield Strait. On a late November night, the captain sailed Explorer into an ice field that he presumed to have been made up of first-year ice – a type of ice with which the hull of the Explorer could withstand impact. Unfortunately, the ice he was facing was much older and harder than he anticipated and a collision with a chunk caused a ten-inch gash in the ship’s hull and down the Explorer went. The passengers and crew spent six hours huddled in lifeboats. The ship took sixteen hours to sink. Everybody survived – they were actually very lucky that the seas were calm and the weather was mild. The sea can churn the Lyubov Orlova like a toy boat, so I can only imagine what it could do to a little tiny lifeboat. Neither can I conceive what it would be like to be woken up at four in the morning by the ship’s shrieking alarm system, donning every single layer of clothes available in the darkness and panic, abandoning everything, abandoning ship, to drift in the cold, to watch the what was only an hour ago my home slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean, all because of a chunk of ice.

Another common misfortune that commonly besets ships that sail in Antarctic waters is the propensity for them to get trapped in ice. This just recently happened to the Kapitan Khlebnikov, Quark’s second biggest ship and a veritable monster of a vessel, this season. Sea ice can be relatively unpredictable in its movement and the rate at which it breaks up, so if a ship is in the wrong place at the wrong time it can indeed get trapped. Back in the days of wooden hulls, encroaching sea ice could break right through the ship and cause its utter destruction. One particularly renowned polar explorer of the last century, a man named Fridjof Nansen, used this phenomenon to his advantage when he designed a ship that when stuck would nestle itself in and go wherever the ice went. He used this innovation in an attempt to reach the North Pole in the 1890’s. He survived, but unfortunately had to go where the ice took him and the sea ice took him all over the arctic, but not the Pole.

Right now the poor unfortunate Kapitan Khlebnikov is experiencing another bout of bad luck. It is currently unable to sail, double-anchored off of the pier of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands because winds are too strong for the ship to depart. The winds can be the bane of a sailor’s existence. The Beagle Channel is our road to sea from Ushuaia and sometimes head winds are so powerful that ships simply do not have enough power to sail against them. It is also the winds that cause the legendary waves of the Drake Passage. It’s not uncommon to encounter fifty-knot winds and six-meter swells down here. These conditions can cause a ship like the Lyubov Orlova to roll as much as forty-five degrees from side to side. You can imagine what a simple task such as showering would be like in these conditions. If ‘fun’ is a word that comes to mind, you are about half right. I think showering while on the Drake Passage might be the most irritating fun a person can have.

This season here on the Orlova we so far have been Lady Luck’s benefactors. The Drake Passage has been incredibly tame, a lake compared to the storminess it is capable of. Ice conditions have been great. Visibility has been wonderful – blue skies, clear days. From the Shetland Islands on our first cruise our ship’s historian pointed out to me a range of mountains visible in the distance. It was my first glimpse of Antarctica, sixty miles away. Of the ten years Shane has been coming down to this region, this day was only the second time visibility had ever been so good that he could see Antarctica from this vantage point. The sunsets have been spectacular and weather has been fine. Whales, since the first one visited, have practically been swimming with the boat.

Thus, we sail, we sail, we sail on a sea full of monsters, to a continent full of ghosts. I no longer look upon Antarctica’s steep, ice-buried peeks without thinking about how Scott and his compatriots walked in but failed to walk out with their lives. Passing bergs serve as a constant reminder of the fragility of my floating world. And every time we cross the Drake we brace ourselves for fifty-knot winds. So here’s to Antarctica, bestowing upon us her fierce beauty rather than her beautiful ferocity. May we stay in her good graces.