Bergs, birds and beating the Beaufort scale

There are some things you should do once in a lifetime. Well, that's what I was told when they suggested sleeping out on the ice in Antarctica.

I was not alone in turning down this chance of a lifetime, preferring to snuggle up in my bunk on the Akademik Ioffe, aka The Peregrine Mariner, while those really intrepid campers were ferried ashore in Zodiacs. For me, simply being 63 degrees south, surrounded by icebergs was adventurous enough that night.

The next morning when the group arrived back on board in time for breakfast, glowing with their achievement, comments ranged from the standard guest book phrases of 'fabulous' and 'fantastic', to 'bloody cold' and 'worst night I've ever had.' Others raved about the stark beauty of the ice that had packed in against the shore overnight, almost imbedding the waiting Zodiacs.

There had been just a flutter of snowflakes most of the night, and although the choice was tents or sleeping bags, the sell on 'mummy' bags (named for their sarcophagus shape) must have been good, because they had the most takers. These combined with sleeping mats (they would have needed a few centimetres more thickness to have qualified as mattresses) and each person's ingenuity as to how to cover the only bits visible – nose, forehead, chin – was all that lay between the Frozen Continent below and the -1C above. One older lady whispered to me that she'd had a secret weapon, though. 'I cheated,' she admitted shyly tossing her grey curls, 'I put a little port in my water bottle!'.

Still there was a certain swagger (or was that a stagger from sleep deprivation?) from those who did it. And those that didn't, wondered if perhaps they might have missed out on an experience that would have crossed the 't' and dotted the 'i' in this trip of a lifetime?

In fact, this almost got to me until someone mentioned that the toilet options has been a bucket somewhere in the icy dark, or a chilly clenched teeth wait until the 7am transfer back to the ship.

Yet there was a reason for even this. Peregrine Adventures is meticulous in its adherence to the guidelines as outlined under the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. Wildlife is to be viewed from a distance that does not cause any interference, protected areas are to be respected, and nothing - but nothing - is to be left in the pristine wilderness, nor anything removed. "Leave only footprints, take only photographs", is the mantra.

As far as safety goes, rules are reinforced - for while this place may be beautiful, it is an 'enter at your own risk' environment, and misjudgements can be fatal. You soon realise that the crew and staff are every bit as interested in returning passengers home in mint condition, as they are in protecting the environment.

While those ice peaks may appear indestructible, the balance is delicate. Endanger any one of the hundreds of species that live here, and the domino effect begins. 

The nine-day, ten-night tour I had joined aimed at allowing each person to experience this place in their own way. There were many agendas amongst the hundred or so passengers. Some wanted to capture wildlife – on film – and for them there were photographic seminars on board, that gave them better skills, and plenty of photographic opportunities on the two outings a day on those Zodiacs - sturdy rubber blow-up boats with motors and full safety gear. Others had dreamed for a lifetime of finally setting foot on the continent that had taunted explorers for centuries. And there were the ones that simply wanted to soak up the peace and spiritual beauty of the place.

The daytime activities and on board seminars conducted by a range of experts, had something for everyone. So you needed to know about whales? Rinie was our man. Penguins? Polar exploration? Digital photography? Someone on staff was an authority. There was even a ship's library with reference books with information on all aspects of Antarctic-ania. 

The off-ship excursions varied too. Depending on the weather and the location, there could be a landing at a penguin rookery, or a cruise amongst humpback whales that might suddenly rear up – spy-hopping they called it – and display a barnacle-encrusted body. One day we visited a manned Ukrainian scientific base and toured the simple huts.

Tours to Antarctica can only take place during the southern hemisphere summer when maximum daytime temperatures range between 0C and 5C, and night temperatures may plunge to –5C. No problem for these cute fellows, though.

Until people visit Antarctica, most imagine that it is all white – an unrelieved brilliance – but this is not so. For starters, icebergs come in a range of fashion colours from white with ink-blue stripes to aqua and turquoise, and even beige highlights. The sea is a deep royal blue, even on cloudy days, as if the colour comes from deep within. And sunsets glow and catch on the snowy peaks, many of which may already be splashed with a pink algal bloom. Even the base buildings are often painted barn red.

Antarctica has a population of around a thousand people, all of them involved in scientific research and other polar pursuits. We saw several empty bases, the shelves still packed with food, books on the table, waiting for the return of the scientists. 

But if Antarctica is devoid of humans, the wildlife certainly makes up for it. Within a day or so, we could identify several species of seals, penguins and whales, plus giant albatrosses, petrels and other sea birds. At times our ship had an escort of penguins diving along in the water – porpoising – like mini dolphins. On land they flapped after us in a comically ungainly attempt to see what we were up to.

Antarctica has several species of whales who seem to enjoy the company of humans, 'spy-hopping' to see what we are up to at various times, often close to the zodiacs.

One day we headed off through Iceberg Alley. Children learn in school that most of an iceberg is underwater, but when you see one the size of an office block, and read that the largest one ever was 31,000 square kilometres, suddenly you give them new respect. Yet there is a beauty to them too. Here there's a floating ice mountain, complete with a wind and water-carved cave, the depths shining a luminous aqua. Then something so like the Sydney Opera House you could laugh.

Yet it has always attracted explorers. Some like Scott and Oates and others from that ill-fated expedition still lie somewhere under the ice. Others like Shackleton, and his crew, who faced tremendous extremes to simply survive after their ship was squeezed to its destruction by the pack ice kept coming back.

This is a vast and remote land. To reach it we had to travel 1000 kilometres south from Tierra del Fuego, to the Argentinian controlled Antarctic Peninsula that pokes up like a bony finger towards the tip of South America. Our ship had stabilisers that Shackleton, in his tiny ship the Endurance, would have killed for, but still as we battled the turbulent Drake Passage, said to be the world's roughest crossing, many passengers were ill.

On the return trip we took a grim satisfaction in learning we had encountered (and weathered) the worst storm there in several years. The Akademik Ioffe, a 117- metre Finnish-built vessel is an 'ice class' vessel, with an experienced Russian crew. There is an open-bridge policy so that even in the storm, we could stand there and watch the ship take on those 20-metre-plus waves. The captain throttled back and took each massive gorge of water at around two to four knots. Any faster, and we could have capsized, he told us.

It was a little like surfing - and a lot like sheer terror - but the crew had already done this crossing on nine other trips, and when I chanced a look at them, they seemed quite unphased by it all, even though they told us this was a Force 12 storm on the Beaufort scale. When I looked that up, safely at home, I shivered, as twelve is the final number on this scale which was used in sailing ship days. Why? because it usually meant that the ships were de-masted by such a violent storm and possibly sank, losing all on board. 

Another time our skilled Russian captain and crewed navigated us through a difficult passage at Deception Island into the caldera of the still active volcano. At the water's edge, and surrounded by frozen peaks, steam rose from the black sands, and the warmth was so enticing that a couple of hardy souls even peeled off their many layers of clothing and took a speedy dip in one of the shallow pools.

This is iceberg land, home to glaciers that sluggishly traverse the continent, splitting off huge chunks of ice when they meet the somewhat warmer water at the sea. On our shore visits we often heard a muffled explosion somewhere, over a mountain, and we knew another iceberg had been 'calved', launched to sail the ocean, travelling around eight kilometres a day, for as long as ten years before finally thawing and breaking up. It is estimated that about two million tonnes of ice breaks off the ice cap each year. The furthest north an iceberg has ever been sighted – and this is truly astonishing – was at 26.3 degrees in the South Atlantic. That's on about the same latitude as Rio de Janeiro!

Antarctica, the world's fifth largest continent, covers 10 percent of the earth's land surface. Here, 75 percent or more of the world's fresh water is trapped, mainly as ice that can be up to 4.8 kilometres thick, and spread over an area 1.5 times the United States.

The Zodiacs zoom about through it all, packed with ten or twelve passengers to each boat, wadded with clothing like so many spacemen. Wear layers, we are told and so we mounded ourselves with thermals and fleeces and coats, topped with the mandatory life vest. No one has ever fallen out of a Zodiac on one of these tours, we are told, but just the same only a few minutes in the - 3C water would do more than just cool your enthusiasm. 

These sorts of statistics could go on forever. Antarctica has the lowest temperature: -89.6C, recorded in 1983. It is the highest continents with an average elevation of 2300 metres, and is the most isolated, being a thousand kilometres from South America, its nearest neighbour, but 2500 kilometres from Australia, and 4000 from Africa.

It IS something to get to Antarctica, achieved by only a few thousand people in all the world’s history. I consoled myself with this. Although I did not sleep on the ice, I have stepped on the shore of one of the world's last truly wild and unspoiled places.

Goodbye to our penguin friends... farewell to a great white mystery.

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Text: ©Sally Hammond

Images: ©Gordon Hammond