At Sea - Saturday Feb 26
We are now at sea plowing our way toward the island of South Georgia, as we have been since Thursday evening, with our arrival some time late tonight. More on that in a moment, but I have had a couple of questions from readers of the blog;
1. Have you seen any other boats since you left Ushuaia?
Yes, the morning after we left Ushuaia. You’ll recall that we left the harbour in Ushuaia in a hurry last Saturday but what the sleeping passengers didn’t realise was that during that first night our ship received a distress call from a Chilean cargo ship in the Drake Passage to say that she was taking on water, her engine room was flooded and she had lost power. Our captain changed course and spent the last half of the night steaming towards her as we were the closest ship to her location. I awoke just as we came up with her at about 7am, the captain put the boat in very low revs to maintain position and we began the tricky job of trying to get a spare water pump over to her so that she could keep up with the water coming aboard and begin to empty the engine room. It took about an hour to get the pump over and hoisted aboard in 2 metre swells and very stiff winds and while this was happening two Chilean military boats arrived to try and take her under tow. So yes we have seen three other boats since we left!
2. Have I been seasick during this passage?
I have been uncomfortable when we were really rolling in the swells but I did have one particularly unpleasant moment, just before dinner after our first day’s sail, the feeling we are all familiar with, cold sweat, dry mouth, a tightening at the back of the throat. I took one of my trusty Kwells pills. I knew if I lay down I’d end up in a pitiful ball on my bunk praying for an early and swift demise, so I went down to dinner instead. I thought that in the worst case it would be better to give my body something to work with, pardon the graphic implication! In any event, had a couple of big glasses of red wine, a rare steak and slept like like sinless babe. For me at least, and counterintuitively, I find that seasickness is much less intrusive on a full stomach. If I don’t eat, hunger pangs and an empty stomach get all mixed up with seasickness and I feel exponentially worse. So best thing to do is just swallow hard and have a good meal! Interestingly, the standard tactic for dealing with sea sickness, looking at the horizon, doesn’t seem to matter, again at least not for me. I can feel queasy and look at the horizon and all it seems to do is exacerbate the nausea. Whereas when I’m in bed at night in my bunk with nothing to be seen, including my hand in front of my face, and the boat is rolling and pitching, I feel as if I’m being rocked to sleep. Part of it may be precisely because I can’t see anything I can’t prepare for the boats motion, not always tensing for the next lurch, so my body isn’t tensing but simply moving easily with the motion. Lots in there for a PhD thesis. By the way, the Kwells medication isn’t available in North America, only in the UK, so I stock up whenever I’m there. I wouldn’t travel at sea without them and they were with me on all my recent sailboat sea adventures. Not often used but a wonderful insurance policy.
Now, on to my travels. In the finish of my last post I was stepping onto the Antarctic continent. I wandered around briefly but the views and the landscape can be seen much better from the ship so having, like Friday, left my footprint in the Antarctic sands I zodiac’d back to the ship where I tried, singlehandedly, to empty the ship’s hot water shower tank. Shortly thereafter we lifted anchor and headed for Deception Island, a name that anyone who has read Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of naval stories set in the Napoleonic Wars or has read any histories of Antarctic exploration, will be familiar with. Once again word pictures since my satellite uplink is much too slow to upload photos.
Deception Island is the caldera of a sleeping volcano. There have been significant eruptions in past times but the last activity was in 1970 when there were signs of steam escaping from vents in the sides of the caldera. A caldera as I’m sure you all know is the shell of mountain surrounding the collapsed central chamber of an exploded volcano. The magma chamber that sits at the centre of all volcanos is the underground chamber that fills with magma which as it escapes, forms the cone that as it grows become the volcanic mountain. When the pressure of molten rock becomes sufficiently intense the volcano erupts spewing lava until the magma chamber empties and relieves the pressure, leaving behind a very deep chamber surrounded by circular rocky walls. In the case of Deception Island, the magma chamber is far underground so it quickly filled with sea water to form a very large interior lagoon in the caldera, whose bottom is the bottom of the empty magma chamber. There is still molten rock not far below the bottom the empty chamber resulting in periodic warming of the water in the caldera’s lagoon. This lagoon is accessible by sea as there is one passage through the rim of the caldera through which the sea is connected to the interior lagoon. This passage was presumably blown out of the rim of the caldera at the time of the last great eruption and is only about 400 or 500 metres wide, both sides of which are towering basalt walls climbing hundreds of metres up towards the sky. Through this passage we sailed and into the flooded caldera.
It is a sheltered body of water about 8 kilometres across and sufficiently deep for the ship to sail in. It is an island with history, and not a particularly savoury one. It was, until 1931, the site of a whaling station, which because of its sheltered location in the caldera, allowed whaling ships to bring their whale carcasses to be rendered down to produce whale oil, the best source of oil for lamps for home lighting until gas replaced it late in the 19th century. The station then converted to a factory for skinning and preserving fur seal pelts for fashionable coats, hats and gloves. Between fur seals and whales the factory was part of the complex that reduced whale and fur seals to about 1% of their original populations over the course of 100 years.
We spent the evening in its shelter. It was a barren, cold, windswept and foggy place. Snow and ice and very little vegetation and nothing on the whole expanse of rock but the remains of the whaling station and its dark memories.
More to come!
