Thursday 10th March; 11th day at sea
This morning I’d managed to get a minor stomach bug, which it’s just occurred to me, might have been caused by the chef’s penchant for doing steak rather rarely. At any rate I decided to skip the morning landing at Prion Island – where the highlight was nesting albatrosses. This was quite a complicated landing as the passengers were split into groups and kept together and I thought it might be a bit inconvenient if I needed to get back to the ship quickly. I stayed on the bridge most of the time, which as there was a radio link to the shore proved to be quite funny. Mostly it was inconsequential chatter between the 5 groups of passengers, but at one point Santiago, the Argentinian member of staff, radioed Hannah and I heard the following:
Santiago: Hannah do you want to come up where we are and we can get to where you are.
Hannah: No, we’re OK really; an albatross has just walked right by us.
Santiago: yes that’s what I mean – we’d like a look as well.
It’s not quite verbatim, but you get the jist. Also R’s just told me that she was in Santiago’s group and didn’t get to see much. Whilst all this was going on, Santiago was busy making sound recordings of the albatrosses, and had set his camera up on it’s tripod directed at an albatross on a nest, and left instructions with one of the passengers to press the shutter button whenever the bird did anything interesting. Unfortunately the camera had slipped and as a result he got a lot of photographs of a completely albatross-free patch of grass!
During and after lunch the ship moved a mile or two along the coast further into the ‘Bay of Isles’ – the afternoon landing being at Salisbury Plain. Rather an odd name for what’s basically the outwash from a glacier, but it was easy to see the features – terminal and lateral moraines – that Gary had described in a lecture on glaciation. The purpose of this landing was to see a King Penguin colony – it was a little bigger than the one we’d seen at Gold Harbour – about 50,000 pairs, covering an area perhaps half a mile by a quarter of a mile, and when we first got there was noisy and smelly, though I got used to it after a while. These penguins were less inquisitive than the previous ones we’d seen, but could still be seen going on little walks. Gary took us up to a hill above the colony where you could get a good view over the colony, and the photos I got on the digital camera are quite good, despite the overcast conditions.
The evening’s lecture was by one of the passengers for a change. This was a John Peacock, a retired army officer, who’d been on a Joint Services expedition on South Georgia in 1964-65. During this he’d covered what’s known as the Shackleton Traverse – the route that Shackleton took from King Haakon Bay on the west coast of South Georgia to the whaling station at Stromness to get help to rescue the remainder of his crew who had been left at Elephant Island in the South Shetlands Islands. Quite a tough walk by all accounts and how Shackleton managed to do it in one 36-hour period, with minimal equipment is almost unbelievable. For example, instead of crampons, they had nails from the boat they’d sailed from Elephant Island banged into their boots.
The governor also turned out to be pretty human and even knew Over – he’d studied law at Cambridge. I rather felt his predicament in South Georgia; his government has no money other than that it can raise through fishing licences and charging tourists for landing, and he has to try and keep the tourists happy, keep the former whaling stations safe, and keep the scientists happy all at the same time. The scientists in particular can see the tourists as an imposition and many would probably rather see the tour ships go away completely and leave the Antarctic and the surrounding islands for scientific research alone. On the other hand the more people, up to a point at least, that see Antarctica the more support the scientists will get.
Santiago: Hannah do you want to come up where we are and we can get to where you are.
Hannah: No, we’re OK really; an albatross has just walked right by us.
Santiago: yes that’s what I mean – we’d like a look as well.
It’s not quite verbatim, but you get the jist. Also R’s just told me that she was in Santiago’s group and didn’t get to see much. Whilst all this was going on, Santiago was busy making sound recordings of the albatrosses, and had set his camera up on it’s tripod directed at an albatross on a nest, and left instructions with one of the passengers to press the shutter button whenever the bird did anything interesting. Unfortunately the camera had slipped and as a result he got a lot of photographs of a completely albatross-free patch of grass!
During and after lunch the ship moved a mile or two along the coast further into the ‘Bay of Isles’ – the afternoon landing being at Salisbury Plain. Rather an odd name for what’s basically the outwash from a glacier, but it was easy to see the features – terminal and lateral moraines – that Gary had described in a lecture on glaciation. The purpose of this landing was to see a King Penguin colony – it was a little bigger than the one we’d seen at Gold Harbour – about 50,000 pairs, covering an area perhaps half a mile by a quarter of a mile, and when we first got there was noisy and smelly, though I got used to it after a while. These penguins were less inquisitive than the previous ones we’d seen, but could still be seen going on little walks. Gary took us up to a hill above the colony where you could get a good view over the colony, and the photos I got on the digital camera are quite good, despite the overcast conditions.
The evening’s lecture was by one of the passengers for a change. This was a John Peacock, a retired army officer, who’d been on a Joint Services expedition on South Georgia in 1964-65. During this he’d covered what’s known as the Shackleton Traverse – the route that Shackleton took from King Haakon Bay on the west coast of South Georgia to the whaling station at Stromness to get help to rescue the remainder of his crew who had been left at Elephant Island in the South Shetlands Islands. Quite a tough walk by all accounts and how Shackleton managed to do it in one 36-hour period, with minimal equipment is almost unbelievable. For example, instead of crampons, they had nails from the boat they’d sailed from Elephant Island banged into their boots.
The governor also turned out to be pretty human and even knew Over – he’d studied law at Cambridge. I rather felt his predicament in South Georgia; his government has no money other than that it can raise through fishing licences and charging tourists for landing, and he has to try and keep the tourists happy, keep the former whaling stations safe, and keep the scientists happy all at the same time. The scientists in particular can see the tourists as an imposition and many would probably rather see the tour ships go away completely and leave the Antarctic and the surrounding islands for scientific research alone. On the other hand the more people, up to a point at least, that see Antarctica the more support the scientists will get.
posted by Iain Burke at 30.1.06
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