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.

A Pattern in the Static

Voyage #2 - November 21st through December 1st

I blame it on Air Force One. Not the plane, the movie about the plane; with Harrison Ford, who plays a perfect president – saving his family, the world, and the ideals of democracy from Russian terrorists, all from the cargo hold of an airplane. Ever since lying in my cabin one afternoon and watching this ridiculous spectacle of a movie I have been, from deep down in my belly to the radiant smile on my face, happy. Well, the kitsch-coffee mug I purchased in Ushuaia on Turnover Day also could have sparked the brightening of my mood. I love kitschy coffee mugs almost as much as I love the coffee that goes in them. Or, perhaps it was Turnover Day itself. Turnover Day is like a holiday: Every ten days, the ship says good bye to one group of passengers and prepares to greet another, and I get a full four hour break wherein I can go into Ushuaia – walk the streets, the sidewalks, visit the internet cafe, the gigantic grocery store, and pass droves of people who don’t know who I am and want nothing from me! It’s just fantastic. But Air Force One must have played a role as well. I mean, come on: The First Lady wields a semi-automatic rifle at the end. How awesome is that?

So, I’m happy. Our ice machine is fixed, the manual labour has dramatically decreased, I have, as previously mentioned, my own little coffee mug to lug around. I strum my guitar in the afternoon. I am eating well. I have a little chocolate every day. I’ve discovered the joys of tea and honey. I’m writing prolifically. My Ipod still has the ability to surprise me, and I get to play DJ every night in my bar. I seem to have nestled myself into that mythical Good Place.

In other words, I’m getting used to the new routine of life down here. Day in and day out are essentially the same. I get up, I work, I take a few hours to myself, I work some more, then I sleep. Sometimes I get off the ship for a bit. The only things that really change are the scenery outside and, every ten days, the guests I serve. In consequence I’ve begun in the past weeks to notice some over-arching patterns in the fabric of day-to-day life, a few quirks specific to my world at sea that I think are worth sharing:

First, I can guarantee that somebody will projectile vomit in a public area on our first sea day. This cruise somebody threw up down a staircase, another guest barfed in the middle of dinner in the dining room, and I watched a cute Chinese woman in a wonderful Scottish Terrier emblazoned hand-knit sweater barf into a vomit bag while sitting in my bar. Last cruise, the little bathroom behind my bar smelled for days after a cruiser vomited indiscriminately into the room. Not a spot was missed. The phenomenon of seasickness is remarkable – a good ninety percent of passengers are always affected. These passengers come on board, get handfuls of medication from the ship’s doctor, cross their fingers in hope of not falling ill, venture out of their cabin on the first sea day in a cloud of naïve optimism, and proceed to barf somewhere inappropriate. The ship then becomes a ghost town for the two days it takes to cross the Drake Passage, and finally, as we reach calmer waters, these medicated passengers drowsily rub their eyes and take in the scenery, as if coming out of hibernation.

Which brings me to the next fact of life I can rely on: The intercom announcement of the first iceberg sighting will clear out my bar with an incredible efficiency. Eyes light up, ears perk, and everyone scatters with their cameras. I observe the frenzy, bemused, as a room full of middle aged men and women abandon their half-finished mugs of hot cocoa and glasses of red wine, joyfully running off with their cameras, the word “Iceberg!” making its way through the group like a game of telephone.

About the passengers themselves, I find that the quality of my relationship with them on any given cruise will resemble a bell-curve. There will be a small group that I adore, two or three that I really, really (insert euphemism here), and the vast majority in the middle I will barely interact with at all - the cruisers that don’t drink, of course. It’s always a shame to see the ones I grow fond of leave the ship. Last cruise I met a great retired Canadian couple that had sailed on their own boat from Victoria, BC to Ecuador, left their boat in Ecuador, traveled down to Ushuaia, and caught the Lyubov Orlova for passage to Antarctica. After cruising with us, their plan was to make their way back up South America, reunite with their boat and continue to sail. A lovely life – no wonder they were such a charming couple. This cruise we have a small group of fantastic young Americans, one of which told me that this boat is filled with the nicest people he has ever met in his life. Awww! I won’t speak of the passengers that make up the latter group. They come, they irritate, and they go. ‘Tis life in customer service, wherever one is.

A reality concerning the relationship between the Lyubov Orlova and myself is that working aboard her will lead to injury from time to time. This is no surprise, considering the fact that my world is always swaying, sometimes violently, and that an unavoidable aspect of my job is to crawl around incredibly awkward spaces in the ship’s hold, complete with unforgiving steel girders, protruding nails and metal bits that I don’t always see. Speaking of steel girders, as I type this I can still feel the nasty bump on the head that I gave myself today while turning around to pass a case of Coke to one of the dining room servers. Last week I managed to stab myself with a screwdriver while chipping iceberg ice. These wounds serve as a constant personal reminder to be careful for God’s sake! I’m not working in a bouncy castle, although it feels like it sometimes.

I can’t say that I mind this particular idiosyncrasy of life at sea: The Lyubov Orlova has the distinction of being the only place where my dreams have such vividness and whimsy that I will actually wake myself up with laughter on a regular basis. Not that the dreams themselves are particularly funny – I usually am puzzled later in the day by what I found so hilarious at four in the morning, but that’s okay. It’s good to know that I’m having lots of fun in REM.

And the Russian crew, God love ‘em: They constantly screw up in the most hilarious of ways. Most recently, an officer on the bridge woke up the entire passenger side of the ship with a reprimand over the intercom that was meant for the engine room. It was a full two minutes before he realized he was scolding passengers, not sailors. During the last cruise, the second mate, a stinky bear of a man, scared the hell out of customers who were drinking in my bar after I’d closed by sitting down with them with his own bottle of vodka and attempting to join their party. While setting up the ship in Ushuaia, our carpenter was repairing the door to my fridge, and a screw was giving him trouble. Rather than taking out the screw and re-screwing it correctly, he decided to force it in wonky and sideways, right into the metal rather than the hole for which it was intended. Watching what he was doing, I started laughing. He looked at me and started laughing too! We laughed together; it’s the Russian way.

I find that living and working on a ship it’s easy to settle into a pattern wherein a number of days will go by where I will forget to leave the vessel – sometimes I won’t even bother to go on deck. Then I will start wondering why I’ve become so grumpy, not realizing that a lack of activity and fresh air has started to transform me into Quasimodo. From time to time I need the reminder to go on land, because my routine is so cyclical that I tend to get stuck in it. I just need a few hours every couple days to romp around in the snow, ride in the zodiac, hang out with wild animals…oh my. As I type this, I realize how much it sounds as if I’ve become somebody’s terrier.

Most importantly though, I can count on being surprised from time to time by something unexpectedly beautiful. I saw my first seal on this trip, an adorable, fat seadog with a cat face, laying prostrate, lolling around from side to side, every once in awhile lifting his head up to check out the crowd of curious bystanders, letting out a grunting honk, and lying back down, as if the act of merely lifting his head and looking about him used more energy than he was willing to expend. He was fantastically nonchalant, but I was enamored.

And the penguins, they are following their own patterns. It is springtime, and they have built themselves nests of rocks whereupon each mound rests one fat, jealous penguin, guarding one fat penguin egg. Next time we come down to the peninsula, the eggs will be ready to hatch, and it will be very soon when fuzzy little baby penguins are running around. And with that, life will go on: Cruisers will continue to vomit in the most unfortunate of places and be filled with awe at their first iceberg sighting, Lyubov Orlova, the cruel mistress that she is, will continue to injure me, the Russian crew will continue to foible, and I will continue to wake up laughing in the middle of the night.

Thus, my brand of ordinary will roll on.