Taking A Boat Into The Antarctic
Two nautical charts are spread out on the nautical table
. They showed these waters have yet to be surveyed. The captain relies on a heading of depth soundings. This is a new channel, one he's never sailed; although he's safely traveled the Antarctic innumerable times before.Dusk sets in and reduces visibility. Then is starts to snow in earnest. The icebergs encumbering the channel are even harder to track as the giant snowflakes cling to the windows. Radar clearly shows them, even with our diminished eyesight. The screen shows the icebergs in frigid orange. One enormous glob dominates the channel ahead on the monitor. The ice is only three kilometers from us.
The captain finally issues a quiet order at one kilometer. The ship changes direction with the adept handling of the helmsman. Through the falling snow and deep fog, we glimpse a tabular iceberg. This kind of berg can only be seen in the southern ocean. These bergs resemble the American plains; they have very flat, wide tops and the sides are straight. They can be over one hundred feet tall.
Not for the first time, has the sheer magnitude of Antarctica stopped me in my tracks. Hopefully we will reach the Antarctic Circle in this polar class cruise vessel. Life was seemingly absent on some of the far-away places we passed on our trip. Seventy-nine years after having been first sighted in 1820, a human spent an entire winter on Antarctica for the first time. A deadly search for the south pole was begun soon after that, and then scientists came to the continent. You wouldn't have been able to afford a trip to Antarctica until recently. Now a trip to Antarctica cost about the same as one to the Caribbean.
Think of Antarctica in terms of a manta ray with a curving tail. The very most northern tip of Antarctica is still 500 ocean miles from South America. Some of the most rough seas on the planet fill this gap. It's called the Drake Passage. Passing though these waters, which are also called ,the slobbering jaws of hell, is the true price you'll pay to get to Antarctica. One of the passengers told us all to stow everything and secure the latches on the cabin portholes before they went to bed.
Our ship left the Argentine port city of Ushuaia and passed through the Beagle Channel. Later we reached open ocean. The ship was tossed for two days on very rough water with no land in sight. Winds approaching gale force blew the entire time. Passing my fourth deck window, ocean spray shot into the air from waves breaking on the bow. Depending on how ill one was with seasickness, you could see swells from fifteen to forty feet in size.
The Southern Ocean greeted us after two days of sailing from South America. The view of a coastal enclave filled my porthole the next morning. The sea seemed to be settled a bit by the surrounding land. The tops of the high mountains were sheathed in wispy clouds. Dark, angular mountains speared through the smooth, white glaciers. Frozen slab ice entered the water. It was rough and bumpy, cracked and dirty. It looks like a huge mountain range has been plopped into the middle of the ocean.
The trip to the continent is similar, according to one passenger, to the labor of childbirth. Antarctica is the world's windiest, driest, coldest and highest continent. The polar plateau only gets about as much precipitation as Death Valley does, even though it holds about 70 percent of the fresh water on the planet. This land is not owned, has no indigenous human groups, or animals that stay year round on it.
This area of extreme weather makes planning difficult. Sailing routes and shore landings depend on that day's weather. Even though we are warned to be flexible, our first landing comes right on schedule. Those groups to which we've been assigned meet on deck. After the call for my group, I climb into an inflatable boat with nine other people. Our excitement builds as we cross the last quarter mile of water. Then, with one step, I join the small group of people who have actually touched Antarctic soil.
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