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.