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 In
January 1998, the midpoint of the austral summer, I joined a half-dozen
paddling friends of Olaf in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost
city in the world. Jonathan Calvert came from Texas, Larry Rice
from Illinois, Dana Isherwood, Lou Gibbs, Phil Rasori and I came
from northern California, and Olaf's old friend Jan Jantzen flew
in from Copenhagen. Stowing our folding boats onboard the Russian
ship, we set off down the rain-swept Beagle Channel, bound for
Antarctica.
That
night we entered Drakes Passage, long regarded by mariners as
one of the most dangerous places in the world to sail a boat.
But in the steel-hulled Shuleykin, equipped with powerful twin
engines and modern navigational equipment, we felt safe. We set
a course toward South Georgia Island, 1125 nautical miles to the
southeast.  We
soon discovered that the stories we had all heard about this Southern
Ocean were not exaggerated. These seas seemed charged with conditions
more immense, more powerful than those through which any of us
had ever drawn a kayak paddle.
Only
here, between 50 and 60 degrees south latitude, does a continuous
band of open water encircle the earth. Vast tropical seas stand
face-to-face with the frigid polar ice, unrestrained by any land
mass. To further intensify the situation, these winds and currents
become constricted as they squeeze between the southern tip of
South America and the north-thrusting Antarctic Peninsula.
The
next morning I emerged on deck and gazed out over the tempestuous
vista that surrounded us. A seemingly endless succession of ocean
waves, some four or five stories high, raced along with us in
an easterly direction. I wondered how the Shuleykin would handle
these gigantic waves when it was time for us to return west and
face the onslaught head-on. The scene conjured up memories of
rapids on a white-water river, on an oceanic scale. The words
of explorer Robert Meithe came to mind, who once observed, "Cape
Horn is the place where the devil made the biggest mess he could."
For
three and a half days and nights we surged along at 12 knots,
the powerful wind, waves and currents at our backs. For those
of us who were heading to Antarctica for the first time, the ocean
around us seemed vast and utterly wild. From my favorite vantage
deck at the bow, I gazed out over the ever-changing panorama of
seething seas and sky for hours. In the evenings I would go down
to the lecture room on the second deck to learn more about this
fascinating world from lectures and slide shows that the American
and European naturalists and historians onboard presented. There
was also an extraordinary series of videos, Life in the Freezer,
that the British had produced about Antarctica. Up on the bridge
deck there was a library stuffed with books about natural history
and the exploration of the area. When I could absorb no more information,
there was a sauna back down on deck two that the crew kept super-heated,
hotter than any sauna I had ever known. There the Russians introduced
me to their custom of rubbing honey on their perspiring bodies,
claiming that it was great for the skin.
At
about 54 S, we began to sense a drop in the air temperature,
a sign that we were crossing the Antarctic Convergence. The naturalists
explained that this is a region where deep currents from the north
collide with frigid, denser polar ones, forcing the nutrient-laden
waters to the surface. The variety and concentration of aquatic
and air-borne wildlife confirmed that we had entered one of the
richest feeding grounds in the world. Pelagic birds, some of which
I had never seen in the northern hemisphere, were much in evidence
here: pintados, prions, southern giant petrels and royal albatrosses
with a wingspan of up to 12 feet.
Three
hundred sixty million birds of 20 to 30 species are estimated
to migrate through or live fulltime in Antarctica, including six
species of albatross and countless flocks of agile, swift-moving
penguins. The penguins displayed remarkable teamwork as they darted,
dove and leapt along the surface of the sea in pursuit of prey.
We also spotted fin and humpbacked whales, seagoing fur seals
and pods of orcas and bottlenose dolphins that had come to join
the feeding frenzy. Paul Konrad, an editor from Wildbird magazine
who was also a passenger on the Shuleykin, explained how the whales
and dolphins came here to feed on the immense quantities of krill
that swarmed invisibly through the water around us.
The
day before we were due to arrive at South Georgia Island, Olaf
announced, "It's time to put our boats together!" But a 20-knot,
near-freezing wind was whistling outside, so we tried assembling
the first of our three folding kayaks inside the ship's bar. Alas,
the big doubles proved much too long for that cozy sanctuary.
We moved out onto the wind-swept deck, clutching the various pieces
of our craft tightly to prevent them from being blown overboard.
The ship had slowed down now, and big waves were rolling up and
overtaking us from astern. A Russian crewman cautioned us always
to keep a firm grip on a guardrail whenever we moved near the
edge of the rolling, pitching deck. A glance at the seething sea
racing past and no one required a second warning. The aluminum
pieces of the boat frames were a struggle to fit together with
our numb fingers, but by nightfall our three kayaks, as well as
a unique collapsible white-water canoe of Norwegian design that
photojournalist Larry Rice had brought along, were all lashed
down securely on the aft deck, ready for launching.
Later
that night, I visited the bridge and found the officers on watch
gathered around the ship's radio, following the weather reports
closely. A big cyclonic depression had developed 250 miles to
the northwest, but it appeared to be moving away from us. Small
icebergs were scattered across the radar screen, and a sizable
one loomed about six miles out at 2:00. At 12 knots and surging
even faster in these following seas, even the Shuleykin with its
hull strengthened for ice, could not risk a collision with something
that size.
Back
down in the lecture room, Russian-born naturalist Peter Ourusoff
began briefing us about the wildlife we would encounter around
South Georgia Island. "Leopard seals are widely regarded as the
most dangerous killers of wildlife in Antarctica, yet it's the
big fur seal bulls in herds on the beaches that tend to be aggressive
toward anything, including human beings, who wander into their
territory." We would soon find out that he was not exaggerating.
By
dawn the next morning, the Shuleykin was at anchor in Grytviken
Bay at 54 17' S, 36 30' W, offshore from an historical Norwegian
whaling station long since shut down. Years of Antarctic storms
had battered and crumbled the row of wooden structures ringing
the little cove. Long before the seal hunters had come, the great
British navigator Captain James Cook had anchored here when he
discovered South Georgia Island in 1775.
The
sky was overcast, but the wind was light and the weather seemed
to be holding steady. At a signal from Olaf, we pulled on our
dry suits and launched our kayaks from a landing platform that
the crew had lowered down to the water. We gathered into formation
and began to paddle towards shore, where a jagged range of ice-clad
mountains loomed above. A flock of swift macaroni penguins dove
and leapt nearby, porpoising to get a better look at us.  My
paddling partner, Lou Gibbs, and I landed our kayak on a narrow
strip of sandy beach near the crumbling remains of the whaling
station, while the other paddlers explored the waterfront by kayak.
We
knew that the legendary Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton
was buried here somewhere. In 1915, after his ship the Endurance
became ice-bound in the Weddell Sea and was ground into splinters,
he and his men subsisted for months on pack ice. When the pack
ice finally broke up, they sailed their two lifeboats to uninhabited
Elephant Island, where they found scant shelter from the Antarctic
weather in a rocky cave. Shackleton then took a few of his men
and sailed 800 miles in the most seaworthy of the two boats, through
the storm- and iceberg-filled Southern Ocean. Their long sea journey
climaxed in a surf landing on the blustery west coast of South
Georgia Island. Even then, however, their trials were not over.
Protected only by the tattered rags that remained of their clothing,
they climbed across the glacier-covered mountains to reach the
whaling station at Grytviken. Incredibly, not one of the Endurance
crew perished during the eighteen months they were lost in Antarctica.
When a journalist back in England asked Shackleton if he considered
his expedition to be a success or a failure, he replied, "A successful
expedition, sir, is one from which all hands return alive."
..Antarctic
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