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.