Sunday, February 2nd, 2025

According to the ship’s Log our position was 56°27.0’S / 065°14.4’W

After having enjoyed continuously peaceful sleep throughout the expedition, some of which was even at night, Morpheus chose my penultimate night on board to take his own holiday. Quite why I woke up, at around three o’clock in the morning, I do not know. However, once that had happened, that was it as far as sleep was concerned. It may even have been that my brain had realised the trip was nearly over.

Outside of our window, the darkness was not, as I had half imagined that it would be, total. Instead there was a soft and faint luminescence from the sea which served to highlight the occasional foamy crest of a wave.

The Plancius sailed serenely on in conditions of almost no swell at all. So, this was the dreaded Drake’s Passage. I do like to think that I am a “glass half full” type of person, but our luck on this whole trip had been a bit stellar.

Some months previously, one of my (so called) friends in Prague had been kind enough to forward me an article on the waters that I could, at that moment, see only a few metres away. That kind gesture was made, no doubt, out of thoughtfulness. However, it had also alerted me to the tidal and wind borne horrors that would possibly be filling our last two days aboard the Plancius.

In preparation, before we left home, I had memorised the following words from the hymn by Philip Coulter, so that I could add it into these notes when it was all happening:

“Eternal Father strong to save
Whose arm has bound the restless wave
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in Peril on the sea”

Well, I would not be needing to add that in now. There was yet another thirty minutes of my life that I would never get back !

Anyway, Lucie was also up and about, so we sat in the half darkness of the lounge and drank a tea and an espresso whilst looking at the Passage and enjoying it in its far less common incarnation, that of the “Drake Lake”.

In time, other passengers and some of the guides began to gravitate there too. Maybe, the “end of term” feeling was contagious.

Lucie and I were now thinking of maybe going to Svalbard/Spitzbergen and/or Greenland and, when he appeared, she actively grilled poor Szymon about possibilities. That would teach him to try and sneak a quiet coffee !

Then, our penultimate breakfast, everything was, at least then, still penultimate. Oddly, because I am a bit fussy, there was not that much I wanted, so my Weetabix was followed by scrambled eggs and mushrooms on toast and then fruit.

While we were eating, our cabin bills were sneaked into our cabin. Ours was pretty negligible. After we had spent time making all kinds of prior preparations for when our card was refused, it quite naturally was not. Those Dutch people (Plancius is registered in Vlissingen) know how to grab your cash – with maximum efficiency. We even managed to “tip” the whole crew electronically without a hitch.

As I was not defending a 100% talk attendance record (I fell asleep one day, early on and missed one), I chose not to go to the talk on how to enhance your photographs. I would not have wanted to get into that. There were a LOT of photographers on board and they viewed people like me, who had a simple camera, as some kind of Luddite.

The next talk was given by Hélène and was more interesting. It concerned the sixteen months she had spent doing wildlife monitoring on the remote, sub-antarctic, island of Kerguelen. She is French and the island is a French dependency . It is south and east of the Cape of Good Hope and not very near to anywhere. There is some French army and navy activity there, but there are lots of scientists counting various things on a continuous basis. The weather is cool and constantly windy, the winters are harsh and a ship only comes there three times a year.

I like nature, but I cannot begin to understand the mindset that takes people to places like Kerguelen on a semi-permanent basis. It can take three days walking, between primitive shelters, to then just kneel on cold rocks, on windy moorland, in order to count wingless wasps, local flora, or invasive dandelions …. and then to do the same thing every week. Despite the hardships, Hélène did three tours there. The Antarctic ice flows must have seemed like a holiday camp to her !

Startlingly, the riveting, if slightly protracted, talk took us all the way up to lunchtime. I was glad because sitting in the warm, whilst watching photos of Hélène standing up to her waist in freezing water, whilst trying to estimate Kerguelen’s feral cat population, had made me forget my interim cookies. Luckily, a good beetroot soup, breaded fish and mashed potatoes and coconut cake soon took my mind off of that.

After lunch, it was time to kiss our rubber boots goodbye. The kissing was figurative, of course. I knew exactly where they had been and would not have put my mouth within a metre of them ! Also, up close, I could not be certain exactly what was causing a slight discolouration in the rubber, but I had a pretty firm idea. After one last go round the logos with the paper clip, it was goodbye to them. I was sorry to see them go – another brick was out of the wall.

Next up was the Plancius Pub Quiz. In honour of Wendy, we called our team “Ear, there and everywhere”.

It was a tough quiz. There were fifty-six questions and we scored highly on geography, history and wildlife. Sadly, guessing which animal or bird was represented by a highly magnified square of its exterior, what was the swimming speed, in knots, of a Fin whale or which child photo was which guide, proved our undoing. We finished fifth, although four points covered the top five teams. The winner, on a tie-break, was the team that got nearest to guessing how much fuel, in cubic metres, the Plancius had used from the time it set off from Ushuaia up until five minutes previously. The answer was 109 cubic metres …..

We did, however, get the prize for best team name !

As I have said, many times, there were any number of SERIOUS photographers on board. These were the kind that carry about three huge cameras all of the time – and each of those cameras, individually, was heavier than our hand luggage.

Like the “birders” they are members of a strange sub-culture which has its own patois that is largely meaningless to non-believers.

One of them, Adam Jones, gave a slide show of his work. Whilst I admit to having been slightly dismissive of the creators, those pictures were simply out of this world. The detail, the composition, the undeniable artistic skill was almost surreal.

Adam did admit that some of the end products had been manipulated with various, readily available, software tools, but they were only already good photos rendered fabulous.

Outside the windows, the Plancius made the turn from the Drake Passage into the Beagle Channel. We had made it unscathed ! A pilot would soon board and it was expected that we would be tied up in Ushuaia by midnight. No more sleeping in the swell.

Because we did not do anything external all day, except off course periodically running to the rail to see yet another whale/Orca/seal/dolphin/albatross/petrel/South Georgia pipit, there was no recap. Instead, with the expedition staff all in “civvies” we were treated to a thanks to them, from Ali, a thanks to Ali, from them. Then we were all given a glass of bubbly and a thanks to us all from our elusive master, Captain Yevgeny.

The Grand Finale was provided by Koen. He had made a film of all of our activities, composed of video clips and photos taken by the staff. Koen has the gift. It was both beautiful and evocative, with flashes of humour. It showed everything we had done and it all got a bit emotional. At the end there was, again, scarcely a dry eye in the house – I guess we all knew then that it really was all over.

The final dinner was also a bit edgy. The quality remained wonderful though, tuna salad, vegetable curry, crepes with ice cream and crepes with ice cream. That last bit was not a mistake, Wanda was full-up and I am not a man to let either crepes or ice cream go to waste.

All of the housekeeping and below stairs staff, together with the hitherto invisible crew, were paraded for our wild applause. There was Albert, the “hotel” manager who announced the meals and whose voice had begun to give us a Pavlovian response, together with his assistant Nils and our own little maid, Manshie, with all of her equally diminutive colleagues. Of course, Khabir, the head chef, once again got the loudest cheer of all.

Faced with the choice of the bar or our cabin, we opted for our cabin. Everyone was in the “let us pretend it is not all over” mode – but we knew it was.

We now had one last night, one last breakfast and the trek back to reality would begin.