Drake Lake and The House That Cherry Built

All too soon our second Antarctic adventure had come to an end and we were putting our seasickness patches behind our ears, wedging everything securely in pace in our cabins, and preparing for the two and a half days' of rolling waves back to Ushuaia.

But nothing happened. Yes of course there were some waves, but nothing at all like the other three crossings we've made. This was that novel experience that they call Drake Lake. A smooth and easy journey back.

It was quite strange to find that we could walk without holding on, we still had a full complement of passengers in the dining room, and that no glasses, cutlery or chairs went flying during a meal.

We spent some time on deck, watching the birds, and we're lucky enough one day to sail close by some pods of whales. The humpbacks were a bit far away to get a good sighting of, but we got fairly close to some fin whales and spent quite some time watching them alongside us.

We also went along to a few of the talks. I particularly enjoyed Sarah's fantastic rendition of a poem called The House that Cherry Builthind it. It is a silly poem, one of those cumulative ones which adds a line but continually repeats the whole of the story so far each time, but it tells a story of an horrendous journey made by Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard shortly before the ill fated trip to the South Pole, where the Wilson and Bowers died alongside Scott.

This journey was incredible not so much for its destination, but rather for the fact at it was done in the middle of the Antarctic winter. Back then in 1911, there was a belief that the embryo of the emperor penguin may hold some vital information about an evolutionary link, and so they were eager to get hold of some eggs. The problem with this is that the emperors nest in middle of the winter, so any egg collection would gave to be done then when the weather is at its worst and the sun never rises.

The three of them set off on their trip on 27 June and made their way in the perpetual dark, howling winds and temperatures that froze their clothes solid. They quickly learned that when they first put their head out of the tent in the morning, they had to remember to have it in the right position that they would want it in for the rest of the day because theitr necks froze in that position!

They reached their intended base camp area Mount Terror on 15 July and built a stone igloo with their tent as a roof, but they still had 6.5 treacherous km to go to Cape Crozier where the emperors had their rookery. This journey took them five days because the conditions were so bad and they had to haul themselves over huge ice ridges and dangerous crevasses.

At the rookery, they collected five eggs; two of them got broken on the journey back to the camp at Mount Terror and they pickled the other three embryos in alcohol. But then the blizzard set in so they were going nowhere. Though it turned out that even being in the tent was dangerous, as one night the fat used to fuel their stove spat and hit Wilson in the eye, temporarily blinding him.

On 22 July the blizzard blew away their supply tent, with everything in it. The next night, the tent that was covering their igloo blew away too, so they were left exposed to the wind and snow, huddled in their frozen sleeping bags.

Somehow they managed to survive like this for two days and nights, with nothing to eat and their only liquid coming from sucking the ice on their sleeping bags. Even their teeth were frozen, so much so that when their teeth chattered in the cold, they actually shattered.

Finally the storm relented. They were lucky enough to find their tent and some supplies, and they set off back to the base camp at Cape Evans, arriving exhausted, frost bitten, but alive.

Cherry-Garrard returned to London after the bodies of Scott and the others were found, and in 1913 he delivered the prized embryos to what is now the Natural History Museum. Unfortunately the start of World War I meant that the eggs were not examined until much later. The results were finally published in 1934, by which time they had long realised that the emperor penguin was not the missing link that that had been searching for after all.

If the ship can't get to the Emperors .....

.... then we have to hope an emperor will come to the ship.  And thankfully, one did.

 

We were back on the ship and relaxing before dinner, when an announcement came over the tannoy that there was an emperor penguin next to the ship.









Within moments just about everyone on board was hanging over the railings watching the solitary emperor that had popped up on the ice right next to us.

It was very obliging.  It walked around a bit, had a bit of a toboggan and even gave a few calls before deciding it was time to slip back into the water and away.

So we didn't get to the rookery, but at least we did get to see one of the elusive emperors close to.

A very icy Weddell Sea

Due to our late start into the Drake, and the slower crossing to avoid the worst of the waves, we only passed through the South Shetland Islands half way through the day we had expected to be our first full day of landings in Antarctica.  But here the seas calmed and we started to see some of the passengers that we 'lost' during the crossing.
With fine weather and only a gentle sailing motion, we took the opportunity to do a practice with the helicopters.  It seems a strange thing to do, but it is very hard to hear what is being said once the helicopter is going, and people do get hit by turning rotor blades, because they can't see them.  And that is in good conditions.  Mind you, I think that part of the reason is just to give us something else to do and get us anticipating the landings.

We sailed on to the Antarctic Sound, passing through to the colder eastern side of the peninsula and, at last, we made it into the Weddell Sea.

And we hit the ice - though not in the Titanic sense I am pleased to say.  We spent some hours pushing our way through the loose ice floes and up on the bridge, I could hear that the captain was getting concerned about how much ice we would find if ahead we were hitting it already.  We carried on through, watching the beautiful scenery around us, and wondering how far we would get.

It is hard to appreciate just how immense Antarctica is.  We are only on the tip of the peninsula, but on a continent that is twice the size of Australia, and when the peninsula is around 1500km long, that makes for a pretty big 'tip'.

After all, it had just taken us nearly three days to sail here and that was only 1000km.  And all we could see stretched ahead of ice was miles and miles of sea ice and ice bergs.  With a few seals and penguins thrown in of course.

When we were here last, we saw some impressive icebergs, but this is where the really big ice lives. The tabular icebergs are freshwater ice that breaks off the vast ice shelves and floats away. Many of the really big ones that we saw were some miles in the distance, locked into the sea ice.

But if you consider that the above water section of our ship Ortelius is about 18m high excluding the masts, then that may help with a perspective in some photos. Bear in mind that a typical height can be 75m, and then you can see from their shape that this makes them very long and wide. Of course 75m is only the visible part; there will easily be seven or eight times as much underneath.

So during the daytime hours, we were looking out onto great swathes of white, with just a few hints of blue. As the sun set at around ten, we were treated to some beautiful reds, oranges and pinks. Then after that, because this far south in the summer it doesn't get fully dark, we still had a lovely hazy, blue tinged landscape to look at.

At around 1am, with most passengers tucked up in bed, I was back up on the bridge watching our progress. The way these ships work is that they break the ice and push it away. That works all the while there is somewhere to push the ice to. But if the ice is solid for too large an expanse, then it has nowhere to go, so the ship can't get through. The ice we were at now was solid for miles ahead of us.

The captain moved the ship into the ice, cracking it up and forcing it along and behind us, but he soon reached a point where the ice had nowhere to go to, and we were in real danger of being trapped in the ice. He had no choice but to pull back into the more open waters.

We were still a long way out from our destination of Snow Hill Island, and so those few of us that were up knew that our plan to see the emperor penguin rookery was already looking decidedly dodgy.

In the morning, the expedition leader Delphine, the Captain and the helicopter crews spent some time discussing what options were open to us. They tried the ice again, but it was not going to be possible safely to get through.

The next step was a helicopter recce.  This showed that while there were a few pockets of open water which the ship would be able to navigate through, there was no way through or around this large expanse we were already at.  

The emperor penguin rookery was expected to be on the sea ice on the other side of Snow Hill Island, which was over thirty miles away from our current position.  This doesn't sound much but in Antarctica, where the weather can suddenly get very bad, very quickly, you just can't safely do a trip that far.  There would be too much risk of getting stuck too far away from the ship.

So our visit to the rookery was not going to be possible, and this far out, we had no idea whether we would get to see any emperors at all.  Clearly everyone was disappointed, especially a few people who had not realised that there was a genuine risk of not being able to get there, but we knew that the Captain and Delphine had not given up without an effort.  And they were soon telling us about some great alternative plans.

In the meantime, what we did have a lot of though, was the ice.  Our purpose in coming to the Weddell Sea was the emperors and the big ice.  We may not have been getting to the rookery, but we were certainly seeing the ice.

As with many occasions, our photos simply cannot capture the real beauty and magnificence, or the sheer size, of the real thing, but I hope that they at least give you an idea of just what an amazing place this is.

Oh, and we did get to see an emperor.  It was way off in the distance, but if you look carefully at my rather blurry zoomed in photo, you can just about make out the way the black markings drop at the side of the neck, and the little flash of yellow.