We're back!

We're back!

The Drake is over...as soon as we see the famous Cape Horn I start feeling better and the big rolling swells diminish as we get amongst the islands at the very tip of South America. We give a few moments thought to all those who have perished rounding Cape Horn and feel hugely grateful for our safe passage.

We can smell the land and the green of the trees and shrubs is a feast for our deprived eyes. We spend the night anchored in a sheltered bay near Cape Horn - everyone abandons ship within about 10 minutes of anchoring to get on land and stretch our legs, savouring the solidness of the ground. Erik and I camp for the night - I can't stand the thought of another night in my bunk. We have a huge sleep, although Erik wakes in the night feeling his thermarest pitching and rolling under him!

The journey up through the channels is a fine mix of sunshine, hail, snow and wind with great sailing. We enjoy the colours and the change in wildlife in this relatively gentle environment, although the rapid weather changes keep us on our toes. We start to see signs of habitation, small fishing villages and then the slightly bigger town of Puerto Williams where we spend another night camping ashore in the beech forest. I eat ravenously, catching up on lost opportunities in the Drake.

As we approach Ushuaia we can hear the noise of traffic and the smell of burning fossil fuels - we have mixed emotions as always at the end of an adventure: sadness at it all being over but looking forward to sleeping in our own beds and enjoying the space of a house to live in rather than a small corner of a small boat! We feel immensely privileged to have been to Antarctica - it's still a land that feels unexplored and untravelled, where you can have some sense of being somewhere that few people, if any, have ever set foot. We hope you've got some of that sense from our writing - thanks for sharing our journey.

We wil be organising the writing from this blog and a few additional articles into a web site with some of our photos. We will let you know when it is done. Also, we will be giving slide shows to the Alpine Club and others so we will let you know of the dates and places.

Many thanks to those organisations that have made this journey possible:
New Zealand Alpine Club Expedition Fund
Watties
Cascade Designs
Silkbody
BackCountry Cuisine
R & R Sports Queenstown
Bivouac Christchurch
Macpac
Chocolate Fellman, Geraldine

Day 5 in the Drake

It´s hard to believe I´ve spent a whole working week in the Drake. The experience can´t be described as enjoyable - bouncing around in continuous motion, never a rest from the pounding waves.

Sometimes it´s just disheartening, every wave we crash into stopping us in our tracks, reducing the passage home to a speed that I could crawl faster than.

Other times it´s amazing. At the crest of each wave the wind catches the sails, picks us up and throws us towards our destination. At night we are blasting towards Cape Horn on a ribbon of silver laid down by the moon.Sail changes are an exercise in sticky-footedness, trying to be useful on a heaving deck awash with water. Other moments are pure delight, such as the wandering albatross glowing orange in the light of the setting sun.As the days unfold Greg is playing a careful game of Chess, trying to manage our position so that we arrive at the Horn without getting a "spanking" - sometimes we hove-to, sometimes sailing west, someimes east. Below decks Bruce is a wonder in the Kitchen, producing a never-ending supply of gourmet delights. After the first day my stomach settled down enough to cautiously enjoy his cooking. Worryingly, Christine hasn´t eaten much for 5 days, let´s hope we make it before she fades away completely!

Erik

An inside view of the Drake

The wind howls through rigging that creaks and groans under the strain of full sails. The boat heels steeply, footsteps thud across the deck, sails flap, a shackle bangs on the deck like a jackhammer just above my head. It's so loud I need to put my hand over my ear - in my top bunk my head is only a foot from the deck so I am intimate with all of the noises going on outside.

I am lying halfway up the wall - we are well heeled over on this tack and wedged between the wall and bunk is the most comfortable position. The boat thuds into something with a resounding bang, and stops for a microsecond. My eyes snap open, muscles tense, and my first thought is 'shit, an iceberg!'. Water pouring over the hatch above my head reminds me that we are no longer in iceberg territory and it is a big wave we have hit - water seems very solid at the speed we are traveling at.

The boat surges forward again as the wave sloshes on down the boat and out through the scuppers. Footsteps down the hatch and there are voices in the galley, resuming the conversation where it left off prior to the call for action. I close my eyes again and drift back into my state of semi-comatoseness induced by seasickness. Somehow, amidst all the noise and chaos I fall asleep...my dreams contain images of being in a house attacked by armies of people with battering rams...

Christine

Leaving the Antarctic

Wine for diesel - not a bad trade for the people of the yacht Sedna, a millionaire's floating palace converted to a filming base by a group of enthusiastic Canadian wildlife documentary makers. They are having re-supply problems and all their wine is still in Argentina, much to their dismay!

We are invited for dinner and are in the zodiac armed with the ingredients to make Pisco Sours (a chilean cocktail) but lack some ice. Not a problem in the Antarctic, we slow down, lean over the side, pickup a small iceberg and race on.

On Sedna the Captain is the cook tonight, so in total 21 of us enjoy a great dinner around their large mahogany table. We toast them for their courage to spend the next 9 months wintering over in the Antarctic, and they us for our impending voyage across the Drake. Later we watch some of their wildlife footage - truly great from an inspirational group. Have a look at www.sedna.tv.

Next morning we wake early to decks slippery with ice and finish getting the boat ready for the Drake. Frozen ropes and sub-zero temperatures make for numb hands and hard work.

Off we sail, and are soon heeled over by strong winds and steep seas. It's hard not to be superstitious about what the future holds, the most dangerous part is as we approach Cape Horn where the sea shallows, the waves get bigger and the storms more concentrated. We have the latest technology of satelite photos and weather predicitions, it only helps to refine the guess of the future and not eliminate the risk!

Erik

Climbing in Paradise

Recently when we get up in the morning the surface of the sea has an unusual wrinkliness to it. I was going to say like the wrinkly skin around an old man's eyes, however, I recently looked in the mirror and realised it looked like the skin around my eyes! The surface of the sea is beginning to freeze, telling us that it's time to go home - before our boat is locked into a frozen world until the next summer.

I am trying to squeeze in a few more climbs and adventures before our return home over the Drake. I manage to encourage Christine and Matt to venture out into dubious weather to climbing the peak leaning over the mooring at Paradise Bay. We climb glaciers and pitch up steep snow and ice in blizzards to reach the top just as the weather clears - one of the keys to Antarctic climbing is to be optimistic!

The next day Matt and I climb another peak on the opposite side of the harbour. It's an amazing experience to be roping up for a climb with penguins porpoising on the sea beside you, hearing the puff of a whale surfacing and watching icebergs float past.

While waiting for Greg and the dinghy I try doing a climb on a crag at the shore. Half way up the climb is a big shelf at nose height that requires a difficult move to mount it. The problem is that it is covered with about 2 inches of bird shit. I scrape it off looking for a hand hold and almost fall, plummeting down the cliff because of the stink -it is unbelievable. I think of my obituary - climber dies because he was not wearing breathing apparatus while climbing!

We try squeezing in a final climb, again with Matt and Christine. We camp on shore but wake to our tent buried by 15cm of snow. The rock looked amazing but is now plastered in snow - it's not going to happen, at least on this trip.

Looks like we (or me at least) are finding reasons for a return visit!

The ultimate irony

My day starts in a snowy tent, biding time with Matt and Erik while we wait for the Northanger to pick us up. Somehow Matt has weaseled into the sleeping bag with Erik, while I am out in the cold! And even more rudely, they both fall asleep. snoring away, while I am reading them entertaining excerpts from Bill Bryson's "A walk in the Woods".

The day improves as we head north towards Enterprise Islands. The snow retreats and the sun comes out - we have a great tail wind and there is not much ice so we even get some sail up and turn the engine off. Greg is looking like the true crusty captain. Swenja is complaining that we haven't seen any whales, when suddenly Bruce spots a whale spout off the starboard. Next minute, giant humpback whales are launching themselves skywards, breaching with enthusiasm and, it seems, just for fun. The show goes on with breach after breach sending up explosive sprays of water as they hit the ocean, ramming home to us just how enormous these creatures are. The show finishes with two of them breaching at the same time - we are all beaming with amazement at the spectacle.

Not too long afterwards, we see more humpbacks, even closer to the boat. These aren't breaching but are much closer and we can see their blowholes as big as dinner plates. They roll over and wave their huge pectoral fins at us, then sound, sliding into the depths with their tails waving a last goodbye. In our 56ft boat we feel dwarfed and humbled by the size of these behemoths.

Awestruck, we continue in to our anchorage - we glimpse the wreck of a boat in the bay as we come closer. We pull right up to it, a rusting heap of an old whaler from the 1920s, 130ft long in its day but today we see only the bow poking out of the sea. It seems fitting that is in this state, Antarctic terns nesting and shitting on its bow, while the gentle giants it once hunted roam and frolic in the ocean nearby.

Things that go bump

Something bumping into the boat always causes a spike of stress for a sailor, especially in the Antarctic. We are anchored at Booth Island and have 4 mooring lines to the shore in a star pattern with the boat in the middle - well braced in case there is a big blow.While we are preparing dinner a smallish iceberg (garden shed-sized above the water and an apartment below) floats slowly past and hooks on one of the mooring lines. Greg and I go on deck and have a look - not much to worry about, the thing is barely moving. What we don't notice is the stress building up on the mooring line, then suddenly ping, pop, bits of metal start flying off the winch as it begins to disintegrate under the strain. Greg starts swearing, we have to get out of here!I jump into the dinghy and begin taking in mooring lines, in the meantime the iceberg is under the back of the boat. I hadn't noticed it before but there is a slight swell, so now we have a 28 ton boat bouncing off a 50 ton iceberg - bang, there goes a bent bracket for the wind generator! It's getting serious, damage to the rudder is a sailor's worst nightmare and the lump of ice is right there. Haul in the anchor, start the engine and we move to safer ground.All this is happening on Greg's birthday, so while these dramas have been unfolding Keri has cooked a gourmet dinner. Not wanting to let it spoil we drop the anchor a few hundred meters further out. I'm on lookout and this time a big one is coming, maybe 300 tons, and its only 7 meters away! I jump in the dinghy, line up the iceberg and start revving the 14hp motor trying to shunt the thing out of the way. Not much happens for the first 5 minutes then I look back, maybe I have moved it a meter, another 20 minutes of revving and it's safely out of the way. Time for the gourmet dinner now!Sometimes the thing that goes bump is a bit more living. Greg and Matt are out placing mooring lines at Dorian Bay in the dinghy when suddenly a large grey-black object, longer than the dinghy, swims underneath. It rears its black head and looks poor Matt in the eye, as if to say 'you are my dinner'. It's a leopard seal, an animal that has a menacing combination of power and reptilian coldness, everything about it is intimidating. Leopard seals have a reputation of biting inflatable dinghies, meaning that you would be in the drink in seconds. Greg and Matt lose their nerve, gun the engine and race back to the safety of the steel-hulled boat. Just as they are getting near, the leopard seal sticks its head out between the incoming dinghy and the boat - it has overtaken a planing dinghy at 15 knots! It's a game of cat and mouse, the cat is a muscular, 1 ton top predator and the dinghy and contents are the mouse! Fortunately they make it back to the boat and Matt leaps on faster than I have ever seen. So whether you are about to have dinner, or about to be dinner, take notice of things that go bump!

Swimming in the Antarctic!

Swimming in the Antarctic seemed like a good idea in a New Zealand summer at 30c, but once I was down here, with icebergs in the sea and a cold wind my bravado began to fail me. Then suddenly the time felt right.After Bruce and Matt's exploits on Una`s False Tits and Chris and my adventures on Mt Wandel, Swenja had brewed up an adventure up Mt Cloos. >From our research it is the highest peak that borders the Lemaire Channel and appeared to be unclimbed. The hardest part of the venture was to find a way off the boat that didn't involve hanging around under ice cliffs. Keri spotted the landing point and the Northanger abandoned us with several days` supplies.Matt, Bruce, Swenja and I headed off in the wet afternoon snow crossing sagging snow bridges to camp in yet another staggering location. The next morning everything had frozen and after two hours aerobic climbing we were on the summit - hard to believe it is a first ascent since it was so easy!We were back at the coast by lunch time and the climate felt positively mediterranean - providing you did not look at the towering snow-capped mountain reflected in the mirror-like sea, or notice the penguins porpoising about. So off with my clothes, push the icebergs away and in! Highly recommended, especially for people with a low IQ!Bruce had a bottle of bubbly from the boat cooling in the water so the afternoon was spent sipping wine, lying on the beach, soaking up the warm Antarctic sun and absorbing the wonderful views. I am now thinking it is wrong to assume that Scott and Shackleton were tough guys!

Demaria Peak

We cruise out from our cosy anchorage at Vernadsky, waving to our Russian friends and admiring the tall ship anchored just off the base. It is a calm day with low misty cloud, very atmospheric as we pass through icebergs of all shapes and sizes. Demaria Peak looms out of the cloud and we all leap into action ready for a dash to the top, some welcome exercise after a couple of stationary days. We make it beyond the dive-bombing skuas and up the ridge, a couple of very exposed steps but otherwise a straightforward climb to another outstanding Antarctic view. We reckon we have notched up the world record for fastest ascent (Swenja is not great at being cooped up on a small boat) and the first ascent in shorts (by Erik). There is no wind on the top and we brew up a soup and take photos for our various sponsors. What a spot! The cloud comes in as we descend, as do the skuas - one making full contact with my head, a bit like getting a soccer ball full force in the face. No permanent damage though, just another wee snippet to add to the whole Antarctic experienceChristine