Thursday, January 16th, 2025

It is always nice to know that people, a long way away, care for your health and well being. So, following my observations about seagulls yesterday, I was pleased to receive a quick note of concern from my sister who lives in Cheshire. Having grown up with me, she is well aware of my ability to conjure up injury involving bruises and (sometimes, lots of) blood, from sources that should not really be able to produce them. I once, for instance, lost so much blood that I had to throw my shirt away, at the hands of a, errrr, deadly banana …..

Referring to those seagulls, she cautioned care that I should not share the same grim fate as the ancient Greek poet, playwright and scholar, Aeschylus. Poor Aeschylus was reportedly killed, in 475 BC, when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head in an attempt to break its shell ! Of course, her concern may have been barbed. The eagle was, naturally, seeking a stone that would smash the tortoise – and there could have been a veiled reference to my lack of hair. But I will always take what I can get ! What my sister did not know is that, because of the sun, the crown of my head was of more than a slightly pink hue. Not quite like a tomato, but probably visible to the ISS, let alone an airborne raptor. I should, I suppose, consider myself lucky not to have been showered with spherical mushrooms by a squadron of marauding buzzards !

All of the above is probably the literary equivalent of nervous blab. The day had arrived – the South Atlantic beckoned. Because of our viewing angle of the bay, I could not see whether the Plancius had arrived after we came home the previous night. My guess was that it was lurking, just out of our view, tensed up and ready to sail.

When we had eaten our breakfast which, by day three, had become a bit samey, Lucie buzzed around like a big bee, repacking our rucksacks. We would shortly need to heft them (it would be locally insensitive to use the S.A.S term “yomp”) down to Club 1210 and leave them for inspection. We needed to board the Plancius before 17:00 and have drinks with the Captain before casting off (let no man say “being cast adrift”) at 19:00.

My stomach muscles clenched (and probably some others too, that I will not mention), the enemy was at the gates !

We duly and very efficiently dropped off our rucksacks in a process that lasted about one minute.. That gave us around six hours to kill before the earliest boarding time which was, apparently 16:00. There was a new boat in the harbour. It looked even more diminutive than the one from the day before (which itself had looked pretty small against the liners), but its name gave it away, “Plancius”. There it was at last.

We could not approach it, because of harbour security, but it was there – so we would have to go.

On the other side of the road, we spotted a familiar figure, milling about, if it possible to do that in the singular. It was Wanda, from the previous evening. She was finding it hard to locate the luggage drop and, as we had just come from there, we were able to point her in the right direction. Twelve hours before, we had not known her – and now, because we did, we could help her out. Some things really are meant to be.

We crossed the road. There were a couple of monuments. One was “glorifying” the Falklands campaign.

The other was a couple of busts of Juan and Eva “Evita” Peron.

Then, we walked along to cafe “M” but it was packed, so we crossed the road to the other cafe “M” which was not. We drank our drinks in a leisurely fashion – and wrote reviews on everywhere we had stayed or eaten up to that point. That killed some time, but not enough. We ordered further coffees, “cold brews” this time and dithered horribly. At least my MasterCard worked when we paid.

In the end, we left in search of lunch. I really hated just killing time, but killing it by eating empanadas did, strangely, work nicely for me. We found a place that sold them, the Pizzeria “El Rinco del Bely” in Avenida San Martin – and frittered away another couple of hours. One empanada that I ate was filled with crab meat – it was both unusual and tasty.

Finally, with about an hour to go, we left and started to walk slowly towards the harbour. We lost a few minutes watching Arctic (yes Arctic) Terns diving for fish in the harbour. What a migration they have, pole to pole ! There was also a heron of some kind, fishing with no little success in the shallows. Its movements seemed almost lethargic – but it was catching a lot of small fish …..

Slowly, we edged nearer the harbour and, who should we meet doing just the same thing, Wanda of course !

There was the wreck of an old boat in the harbour. We snapped it and sent it to our friends in Prague saying that we had hoped the ship to the Antarctic would have been more seaworthy. I wondered when my next attempt at any kind of humour would be. I was truly nervous !

We walked to the harbour and just went in. The security seemed impressive, but it was actually quite a lot less than negligible and there was our boat, the Plancius, in its full glory. It really was quite tiny compared to everything else moored around it.

Wanda took some pictures of us. As I have said, the sea makes me very nervous. As we posed in front of the Plancius, I wondered if it was the last time I would be smiling for almost three weeks.

Boarding was quite easy and we were shown to our cabin which was far higher above the water than we had thought it would be – and also quite roomy, in cabin terms. We also had a window, not a port-hole – and there was deck, not a wall of steel, outside. Luxury and not the “steerage” I had half expected !

I love statistical implausibility. The deputy activities officer, Martin, was born in Eversholt, Bedfordshire, around eight kilometres from where I grew up. The Lottery on the next Saturday, suddenly looked like a certainty compared with the probability of that one.

Scarcely had we (well Lucie) begun unpacking than we were summoned to a “safety meeting” which the crew were obliged to hold before they could undo the mooring ropes. This included a mock alarm which had us all scampering to our cabins for life-jackets, lining up to be counted (106) and a mock exodus to the lifeboats. It took a while. If it had been for real, we would all have been in Davey Jones’s Locker !!

Anyway, it seemed to satisfy the crew, if not the strict letter of maritime law. Outside, off came the hawsers (I had researched nautical terminology) and away we went.

 

According to the Ship’s Log, our starting position was 58°80.2’S / 068°30.3’W
We chugged out of Ushuaia, it seemed our cruising speed would be about 10 knots (like a bicycle) and the Beagle Channel began to unfold before us.  I decided to take a nice “corny” shot before we were out on the proper stormy ocean !

We particularly wanted a look at Puerto Williams, where we had been in 2017, but it was a long time coming. We had drinks with the Captain, who was some taciturn Russian (!!!) called Yevgeny. I had been hoping for something easier to remember, like America, Pugwash, Hook, Fantastic or even Birds-Eye, but I was disappointed.

Then it was time for our first briefing. The  “Expedition Leader”, Ali started her speech by saying that the weather would not be good and the sea would be rough all of the following day. To ram this home, she showed us the “Windy” forecast map. This indicated there would be a strong wind blowing and she recommended us to take tablets for seasickness. How encouraging ! She also said that, if we needed to vomit, we should do it in a secluded place, as it tends to be infectious. We should also, we were told, try at all costs not to vomit on the captain’s bridge. We would have access to the bridge throughout the voyage (except when operations such as landing or anchoring were taking place). All in all it was not what a nervous sailor, as I then was, wanted to hear at all.

Next came the evening meal, served buffet style. This proved, beyond doubt, that having money does not mean you have manners – and I am not talking about Lucie (or me). The food was great, but it was an ill-disciplined, noisy mayhem !

Luckily, Puerto Williams was finally in sight off of the starboard bow (to the right of the sharp bit, land lubbers) so I had an excuse to sneak back outside. Our progress was so leisurely that Lucie finished her meal and joined me long before it was actually camera time !

Although we had not previously seen it from the sea, we flew in, the World’s most southerly TOWN did not look much different. It might have been slightly larger and, as I have said, Google maps claimed it now had an hotel and restaurants. It remains, however, a tiny place that is still inaccessible by anything other than boat or aeroplane. Rather disappointingly, the huge Chilean flag, put there to bait the Argentinians and to which we hiked in 2017, appeared to be no more. The Plancius chugged onward in the twilight. Strangely, it seemed a little bit darker here at 22:00.

We arranged internet access, which was free, but dependent upon the vagaries of SkyLink, Elon Musk’s ring of satellites. This was a new innovation, ours was the first expedition to try it and the internet had previously been mainly unavailable. Sadly, for some odd reason, only one device per id could be linked to it at one time. We elected for our iPads. Change was possible, but it took up to four hours. We did not bother.

We also collected our rubber boots, a process which proved we both have bigger feet than we thought !

Finally, we took up the offer of sea-sickness pills from Eva-Marie, the ship’s doctor. We were not keen on this but it was predicted that, when we left the Beagle Channel for the South Atlantic, at around midnight, things would get more than a little bit “rough” ! Dr Eva worked in an Emergency room in a Swiss hospital and takes a job on an expedition once a year.

The doctor also explained that the pills could cause drowsiness. She was certainly right, Lucie was sound asleep in less than twenty minutes. I wrote up the day’s events and then lay in my bunk, feeling my body slowly rise and fall in tandem with the swell. It was an odd sensation, not unpleasant, per-se, but odd. I wondered, for about ten seconds, how long it would take me to go to sleep ………