Last week, we presented Part 1 of Vincent Ross’ journey into Antarctica aboard the Vavilov. This week, Vincent travels aboard a Zodiac into the heart of raw Antarctica.
The next day, the Zodiacs ploughed through choppy seas to make the beach at St Andrews Bay. Snow-capped peaks over 3,000 metres high overlook the bay, formed by a glacier which Captain Cook first sighted in 1775 and which now bears his name.
It was a strikingly beautiful setting in which to wander among yellow-crested king penguins, dozing elephant seals and seal pups suckling from their mothers.
As the ship made its way south, we watched the barometer. A plunge in air pressure meant foul weather. None of us wanted that.
The Vavilov passed Elephant Island in the South Shetlands, where Shackleton’s crew were marooned for three months on a bleak coast — 22 men living beneath an upturned wooden boat, surviving on penguins, waiting for “The Boss” to return. He did.
On the twelfth day, at Aitcho Islands, we made our first landing in Antarctica, hiking past towering pillars of black basalt and along a lonely, stony beach scattered with bleached whale bones. At Deception Island, a collapsed volcanic caldera rising out of the Southern Ocean, the grey landscape is dormant but not dead. Scientists say it is likely to erupt again.
The water in Port Foster boiled in 1923, and eruptions in 1967 forced a mass evacuation of the research stations. Today, visiting tourists take baths in holes dug in the beach, which quickly fill with piping hot water.
At the end of the second week, the Vavilov slowly made its way past icebergs into the surreal atmosphere of Wilhelmina Bay, shrouded in blankets of fog and lightly falling snow. Here, the Zodiacs took us to the heart of the raw Antarctic, past towering glacial cliffs of ice with giant blocks seemingly ready to topple at any moment, past weather-carved pillars of aqua blue ice.
The Vavilov didn’t drop anchor that night, but drifted in the middle of the Gerlache Strait with engines idling, the helmsman ready to change course to avoid icebergs.
The next afternoon’s shore landing at Neko Harbour, fed by any number of glaciers, their glaring white fract
ured faces groaning and cracking like rifle fire, offered a close encounter with these slow-moving giants.
Glacier ice is so dense that a cubic metre weighs about a tonne.
Setting foot on the Antarctic continent for the first time, a small group of the landing party perched on a rocky point.
An avalanche high up the mountain rumbled in the distance. Ten minutes later, a chunk of ice the size of many buses groaned, cracked and calved from the glacier, falling into the bay in a thunder of broken ice and spray.
The return voyage across the Drake Passage to Ushuaia took two days, ploughing through a four-metre swell. After so many extraordinary experiences, rounding Cape Horn on the tip of South America was an anti-climax.
A few hours into the homeward flight, I realised a very real sense of loss. It was almost certain I would never see Antarctica again.
Photo Credits
All photos © Vincent Ross. All Rights Reserved.
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