Monday, January 27th, 2025

According to the ship’s Log our position was 58°54.5’S / 048°30.2’W

From the ship’s Log Book: “the sea is restless again, fog“

I passed yet another peaceful night in our cabin sleeping, what my mother used to refer to as “the sleep of the blessed”.

Whilst I do not consider my tendency to wake up early to be a problem, it did mean that, in order not to unduly disturb Lucie when my eyes popped open, I needed to go upstairs and sit in the lounge. Usually, I got around an hour to myself, which was blissful because I think I may have been approaching a kind of socialisation “saturation point”.

Outside of the window, it was a very grey morning and the Plancius was motoring steadily through a smoothish sea. Strangely, it was very foggy and, for a few moments, I felt a slight frisson of anxiety that iceberg A23A had somehow put on a spurt of speed in the dark and was poised, a short distance behind the all enveloping cloud to send the Plancius to the sea bed.

Do not ask me why, I am not a meteorologist, but the fog suddenly disappeared. To my relief, there was not a single iceberg anywhere in sight. Phew !

As Coleridge so aptly put it:

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the planks did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

Luckily, I may be old, but I am neither ancient, nor a mariner. I do not have a bow and arrow and, I am sure that, were I to so much as ruffle the feather of a passing Albatross, the “birders” and eco-crazies on board would fall on me like a pack of wolves and tear me into petrel friendly chunks !

Oh ! and I also know how to spell rhyme …..

Like South Georgia, the Antarctic proper has very strict bio-security regulations. Fortunately, these are identical to those we were already familiar with. However, because of those regulations, we were obliged to view a video, produced by the Antarctic tourism association (IAATO). This was even swankier than South Georgia’s, but it did not feature the great Sir David Attenborough. The underlying message, however, was identical, “Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints”.

Anyway, as you can probably imagine, we were pretty good with the tweezers and paperclip by then, so checking our clothes and being cleared to land was a comparative breeze.

The sea conditions were steadily getting worse. The wind had picked up quite considerably and the placid waters of the early morning were quickly replaced by long, rolling waves. The bridge issued the “one hand for yourself, one hand for the ship” message that indicated the wind was now over thirty knots.

Happily, we made it to lunch (spicy soup, pork with rice and pineapple upside-down cake) without falling over. There was, naturally, quite a debate about whether, if you drop upside-down cake and it lands, as normal, upside down, whether it is then just cake …. Do not blame me, days at sea tended to drag a bit….

After lunch, the other members of our small group signed a birthday card for Wanda, that Lucie and I had bought in Grytviken. While we were doing that, there was an announcement that the office was open to receive payments for the items sold at the auction. We immediately went there ourselves and made a further donation. For this, Ali agreed to wish Wanda a Happy Birthday during the wake-up call on her birthday the next Friday. Paying the donation by card was a bit of a hassle – and the ship did not even have a Clover terminal – but we managed in the end and that was another box ticked off.

The afternoon lecture was given by Szymon and was about glaciers and icebergs. Who on earth would have dreamed how complicated a subject that could be ? If you think that an iceberg is simply water that, due to being below zero degrees Centigrade, becomes solid, you could scarcely be more wrong ! The way that glaciers, which sometimes, when they come to the sea “calve” an iceberg, get formed, can take up to a century. The ice is originally snow, which is full of air, up to 95%. However the cumulatively huge weight slowly compresses the snow, firstly into cloudy, air-filled, ice which, as the weight increases and more air is squeezed out, slowly becomes clearer.

Other icebergs get “calved” from ice-shelves – and there are manifold ways those shelves can be formed. Water, it seems, does not simply freeze and, with varying salinity levels, the point at which it starts to go solid can actually be way below zero …..

What we call fresh water, makes up only 3% of the water on Earth. All the rest is in the seas and oceans. Most of the fresh water is in glaciers and permafrost (69%), some in groundwater (30%). Only 1% (or 0.03% of all water on Earth) is in lakes and rivers ! It was mind blowing, because nature never makes anything easy.

The next entertainment was a documentary on how the wreck of Sir Earnest Shackleton’s ship, “The Endurance”, was located in 2022. It was a nicely done thing which cut in a lot of the actual film shot by the expedition photographer, Frank Hurley and extracts from the diaries of crew members, into a fascinating documentary about the search. Obviously, but apparently not for “dramatic” effect, the wreck was finally located in “borrowed time” at the very end of the search. I know I am a slightly soppy person, but the diary extracts were very moving. All of those people on The Endurance, were possessed with a level of strength, fortitude and selfless courage that puts all of us to shame. I had a tear in my eye at the end – and Shrek was not even in it !

The daily briefing revealed that, although making for rough going, the strong winds had meant an unusually fast transit from South Georgia. We were told that we should be at Elephant Island on the morning of the following day.

If conditions permitted, we might even be able to land in the bay at Point Wild That was where Shackleton’s remaining twenty one crew had waited for five months for him to cross to South Georgia in an open boat and return in a ship to rescue them.

The dinner was what was becoming the usual “chat-a-thon” with food. I had a kind of salmon tartare (presumably un-krilled), a nice rib-eye steak and chocolate fondant.

Then, it was finish writing this and go to bed, because there seemed to be less rolling when you were laying down. Maybe, we hoped, we would have some more serious adventuring the next day.