Those of you who have been following Apsara’s tracker lately might have noticed that it was in Antarctica. Not with Apsara, though, she’s safely tucket away for the winter in South Brittany.
I had found a job as a first mate on an expedition boat which I joined in Brazil in October for the delivery to Ushuaia followed by a month-long trip to Antarctica.
I came to Antarctica thinking I was going to take wildlife pictures. I had heard about whales, seals and various kinds of exotic birds such as penguins and blue-eyed cormorans.
I can confirm that the shores of Antarctica are indeed teeming with life. I saw more whales in a couple of weeks in Antarctica than in the rest of my life. And most animals there are really chilled and can be approached very close, so there are good opportunities to photographs them at very close quarters.
But what really took my breath away, and that I have been photographing most, is ice.
Antarctica is the world’s smallest continent after Australia, and yet it holds a whooping seventy percent of the world fresh water. It’s easy to understand why when you get there. It holds it as ice. and there’s ice everywhere. On land, in some place, ice is nearly four thousand meters thick and hundreds of thousands of year old. And on the water also, ice is omnipresent. Floes, growlers and icebergs of all size and shape, some of them truly amazing, as they capsize, get stranded, or otherwise get sculpted by the seawater that will, eventually, swallow them.
Colours too can be stunning, some bergs have an amazing blueish tint that indicates old ice, possibly thousands of years old, others are tinted various shades of gray by the rocks they have eroded on the way down to the sea.
Ice adds a compelling layer of difficulties to sailing. Ships sailing in these waters exchange information about ice condition in a particular channel, for it is the ice that dictates your speed and course (icebergs always have right of way, ask the Titanic), and ice can even block your way in, or, much worse, out. And conditions can change very quickly. Tides, winds or a glacier calving nearby can in a very short time clog water with some much ice that it becomes impassable and turn an idyllic anchorage into a deadly trap in a matter of minutes.
Navigation too can get much more difficult. Icebergs can look like islands, or partially obstruct sight of land, and small islands can look very much like iceberg.
I have yet to capture on video the tumbling of a glacier into the sea, but I saw one at close quarter when a glacier calved and sent thousand of tonnes of ice rolling down into the sea a few hundred meters from where we were. Only a few minutes earlier, and we would have got caught in the massive wave that rolled on from the “crash site”. And the following morning, the channel out of the anchorage was so thick with ice that I wasn’t sure we’d manage to get through. We did, very slowly, pushing blocks of ice, some of them the size of a small car, out of our way. You need a solid metal hull to sail there. And a bit of luck.
Ice can be deadly. A sudden shift of wind can trap you into a bay, with ice being blown into it, and there’s no way out. I happened to a German yacht in Greenland recently. The crew had just enough time to clamber ashore before a massive berg blown by an onshore gale crushed their boat against what had become a lee shore. It’s easy to see how this could happen to anyone there. And even a small growler, almost invisible in a choppy sea with a near gale blowing, could easily sink a yacht hitting it at speed.
Much more than the cold, it is the ice that make high latitude sailing a rather risky business, or the ultimate sailing challenge, depending on how you look at it.