Blogs from Antarctica, Antarctica - page 32

If stepping ashore at Cape Adare was magical, walking down the gangway and straight onto a vast plain of snow-covered sea ice which stretched away to the distant foot of the Campbell Glacier was breathtaking. We’d spent the first few hours of the morning on the bridge or out on deck watching incredible scenery unfold around us. As we breakfasted, the ship rounded Cape Washington and the simple magnificence of Mount Melbourne, and entered Terra Nova Bay. In the distance were the ice cliffs of the Campbell Glacier’s tongue, and beyond that the peaks of the northern end of the Prince Albert Mountains. It was a stunning day. In compensation for the wind and grey skies of the day before, the sun was shining in skies that were a delicate shade of blue with only high ... read more

Breaking through the pack ice into the Ross Sea was far from a foregone conclusion. Aurora’s previous trip in January had not managed to do so, and we spent an extra couple of days battling this ice ourselves, venturing as far east as the dateline and using helicopters for recce flights before we found a path through. Once through and into the Ross Sea’s polynya, a recurring area of open water, our battles were far from over. Fast ice around the coast would challenge our attempts to approach some of our desired destinations sufficiently close for either Zodiac or helicopter landings. Last season’s pack ice should still have been disintegrating, but recent temperature variations meant that new ice was already forming rapidly. Even for Antarctica aficionados, it was an astonishing trip in terms of the number ... read more

To set the scene… Our trusty vessel, the Marina Svetaeva, was an ice-strengthened 1989 Polish-built, Russian-registered 90-metre passenger ship, recently acquired (previously leased) by Aurora Expeditions. While not an icebreaker, she was, effectively, only half a grade away, and we can certainly now vouch for her ice-bashing capabilities in the careful hands of her skipper, Kapitan Gena, and his Russian crew. In addition to the forty-odd crew, there were about twenty mainly-Australian staff and lecturers to look after our gastronomic, intellectual and logistical needs, from cooking and running the bar, to manning the inflatable landing craft, Zodiacs, and co-ordinating helicopter flights, to educating us about the history and fauna of Antarctica, and other related issues. The experts on board were a delightful group. Variously British, Kiwi, Australian and Argentinean, th... read more

Antarctica. The windiest, coldest, highest, driest continent on this planet. The amorphous and largely-ignored white bit at the bottom of the map. The last place on Earth to be conquered by man. The obsession of near-legendary explorers such as Scott, Shackleton, Mawson, Byrd and Amundsen, and the death of many who sought to push the boundaries of man’s survival. A land of 24-hour daylight in summer and incomprehensible endless night in winter. Penguins, seals, whales. And all a very, very long way away. This was always going to be totally different to any other travelling I’ve ever done: long periods at sea, freezing temperatures and an itinerary that was, at best, aspirational and, at worst, quite likely to be rendered fictitious. 160 people - passengers, staff and crew - joined an ice-strengthened Russian vessel in Bluff, ... read more

11th to 21st February 2008... read more