Last Day March 26: homeward bound

LAST DAY (Saturday)

Things calmed a bit by yesterday afternoon and now the patch is off and the bottom of South American is well in sight.  Home soon.

Day 8 March 25: No communication and 20 foot swells

DAY 8 (Friday)

We’ve been in the Passage all night.  Seas look to be about 10-15 feet, but some swells are well over 20 feet.  Somehow the crew prepared and served breakfast even though no one can take more than two steps before having to grab on to something.  This is a pretty big ship; it’s being tossed about like a toy in a tub.

Still no phone or internet.

Day 7, March 24: E-base

DAY 7 – (Thursday)

Bellinghuasen looks like a city compared to where we have been.  There is a Chilean base right next to a Russian base; together it looks like a small town.  During the Cold War the Russians used this base to refuel spy ships and submarines. They made an awful mess.  It has an airport and there are trucks cruising about. 

Because only nations are allowed to have structures on Antarctica, Robert had to cut a deal to locate his E-Base there.  So he agreed to remove 15,000 tons of Russian junk and take it back to South America to be recycled.  The effort took him 8 years and he brought in young people from all over the world to help him do it (you can only work 3 months a year).  He made a point to bring teams of Palestinians and Israelis; Pakistanis and Indians; Russian and Chechens; etc..  For all of that, the Russians gave him a spot on a bluff above the Russian base, near the remarkable Orthodox Russian Chapel they had built.

He could not have picked a more God-Forsaken place.  We went ashore in 20-40 knot winds and climbed the bluff to the E-base.  A team from China Power and Light (a partner of 2041) has been there for 11 days working on the equipment and doing experiments.  We are here to pick them up – and to see the E-base.  This is our Northernmost stop so far – but by far the coldest, mostly because of the wind.  This is the first time the water in my water bottle froze.  The wind turbines outside the hut seem like they are about to blow to pieces (which, of course, is what happened before).  We then hiked to the other side of the Island to look for Southern Elephant Seals.  Wicked wind, but a good hike and we found a pair lounging on the beach.  These are the largest member of the seal family in the world.  These two were teenagers, but still a good 15 feet long.

We’ll be heading for the Drake Passage in a few hours.  Unfortunately, we are not going to have the same luck going back that we had coming over.  There is a large storm system moving through.  We are planning nothing for the next day and half at least – even meals will be intermittent as we all expect to be curled up in our rooms.  There really is no safety concern in a ship like this; it is just extreme discomfort.  We are told that on a scale of 1-10 toward wicked bad seas and weather, we should expect an 8.  I just put on the patch.

We just got the final segment of Robert’s presentations on leadership --.  Just extraordinary and in his Brit way, absolutely hysterical.  He talked about how when he got back from the South Pole he went to see Jacques Cousteau – who had sponsored his South Pole expedition (on the condition that he go back and retrieve every single thing from his base camp on the Ross Ice shelf.  Since the boat he had commissioned to do that sank, it was quite a feat to get it done and it took another year, including an extraordinary story of a mid-continent refueling of his airplane as it went to rescue the stranded base camp staff).  Cousteau asked him to now dedicate himself to something more.  That led to his North Pole expedition (which he reached in 1986), to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, to his round world journey on the 2041 yacht, which continues to travel to remote places of the world to inspire young people.  The stories of these journeys are unbelievable.  Again, read his book.

We had our departure ceremony on the bow of the ship.  A tradition.  “Jumper” – one of our most colorful team leaders and a former UK Special Forces navy seal – led the three youngest passengers thru a ceremony where the ships bell is rung three times for Neptune, three times for the ship, and three for the Drake Passage.  It is meant to ensure luck crossing the Drake.  We’ll need a little bit.   

Unfortunately, the ship’s internet and satellite phones are down.  I might not be able to talk to or communicate with my girls until Saturday night.  It’s Thursday afternoon.

Day 6 (con't)

You (we) really need to listen to this guy Swan a bit I think.  He is clearly crazy; but talk about walking the walk.  This is one of the toughest bastards on the face of the Earth.  Who the Hell voluntarily hauls a 300 pound sled over nine hundred miles in subzero temperatures 9 hours a day seven days a week for nearly three months?  And he is going to do it again – though this time he is going to make it a little bit more challenging by not bringing fuel for a camp stove, for example.  When somebody cares enough about something to do things like that, the least we can do is take a minute to think about it I suppose

We just watched a film Sir Robert made three years ago.  Tomorrow we are going to Bellinghausen Island, where Robert and a crew spent a month at an “e-base” they built powered only by renewable energy.  With no sun to speak of and winds that destroyed their wind turbine, it was not an easy gig.  Rob said it was about as miserable as he had been.  It must have been hard to struggle to boil water for one cup of tea when just down the way the Russians and Chileans were enjoying hot showers and full meals.  But they survived. And on his last day, the President of Chile flew over their base on his way to a nearby Chilean installation.  As Robert said – “He flew over with three helicopters and we understood that he just consumed far more energy than we busted our asses to save in the last month.  But that’s not really the point.  The point is that we did it and the point is that we sent a message that it could be done.”  Robert left from there and sailed to the five largest polluting nations on earth to meet with school children to talk about clean energy.

Day 6 March 23: Whiskey on Ice

I cannot say that that was a good night’s sleep, but it was quite a night.  The weather was good for most of the evening.  As one of the few with the foresight to sneak some whiskey onto the island, our sleeping areas became the party spot.  One of our colleagues is with the U.S. Green Building Council; he is also a professional opera singer.  He entertained us with arias under the moon.  That was great, but then others thought it would be a great idea to jump in with off-key renditions of bad songs.  The large Weddell seal who had been sleeping all day about 50 feet from us immediately got up and shuffled another 50 feet away.

It was quite warm in the sleeping bag, but sometime in the middle of the night the wind shifted and it got damn cold.  Wind has a way of getting through almost anything, and the combination of no pillow and cold made for less than a sound sleep.

In the middle of the night, one of the guides starting running through the camp banging two shovels together.  Two seals decided they needed a closer look and starting pushing a few sleeping-bagged people around until he scared them off.

We got up before dawn and broke camp.  The ship, after dropping us off close enough for a zodiac trip left the bay and went 30 miles out to avoid icebergs.  I think the real reason was so the crew could have a huge party with all of us gone without us hearing the music.  They did seem a little hung over this morning.  Before leaving, a few of us (for me in honor of my yogi wife) did some “snow-ga” on the ice.  It did warm us up.

Back on the ship, had some breakfast, and looking forward to a shower before heading ashore again.

We made our last trip ashore the Continent proper.  Another Gentoo colony and a hike to a high vantage point to watch a calving glacier.  Perhaps the most spectacular spot we have been yet, we watched small “calves” while waiting for an enormous piece of teetering glacier to drop.  We waited and waited, but we had to get back to the ship for a truly insane activity – swimming.

Unfortunately, a tradition of these expeditions is a “polar plunge”.  While not mandatory, it was frowned upon to not walk out on the back of the deck of the ship in sub-freezing temperatures in your bathing with entire crew watching, to be fitted with a harness (so you can be retrieved in event of shock, I suppose) and to plunge into the frigid water.  The first guy to go set an undesirable precedent of diving and then swimming 30 yards or so to the nearest iceberg (which was moving away from the boat) to touch it before swimming back.  I was second and cannot begin to tell you how damn cold that water was as I swam at Olympic speed to touch that goddamn hunk of ice and back.

DAY 5 March 22: Whales and Work

Most amazing day yet; and not nearly over.  This morning we anchored in Whihelmina Bay on the Eastern side of the Peninsula.  It is famous for whales, and it did not disappoint.  We boarded Zodiacs and headed into the end of the bay, which is surrounded by 5000 ft mountains and glaciers and is filled with floating ice.  We quickly found a number of families of Humpbacks.  We were able to pull right  up close them.  Many were sleeping, actually, but other put  on a little show and showed some interest in us, sometimes literally swimming under the boats (which of course are only a fraction of the size of the whale).  Combined with a  family of Minke whales and a whole bunch of show-boating Crabeater Seals, it was a fun morning.

We worked on our “program” for much of the day.  This is getting increasingly stressful, but essentially I need to come up with a “deliverable” from this trip that will have some positive impact.  The original idea was to produce the first “sustainability report” from Antarctica.  We are now moving toward more of a “declaration” or “statement” from Antarctica that ties renewable energy, Swan’s upcoming expedition, preserving Antarctica, climate change, leadership, personal commitment etc.  Yeah, I’m supposed to figure all that out.  We have spent many hours discussing as a group and in break out groups.  I have started drafting the statement and will share what I have with the group tomorrow.  We are running out of time.  We will hit the Drake Thursday around midnight and at that point, all bets are off so we need to have all of our work done before then.

In the afternoon we went ashore on Ronje island to set up our camp for the night. It is a breathtaking sheet of ice about the size of 2-3 football fields, covered with penguins and a few seals and surrounded by mountains and glaciers.  The wind is pretty light and we are expecting a pretty good night weather wise (in Antarctica terms anyways).  We set up tents, but the guides basically said that if you use a tent you are a wimp.  You have to plop your sleeping bag right on the ice and look at the stars all night.

After setting up camp, we Zodiac-ed over to the largest Gentoo Penguin rookery in Antarctica.  300,000 nesting pairs.  There were lots of loud fuzzy chicks.  There we very cute, but the guides said that all the chicks still there this late in the year will die.  They will not be ready to move when the colony heads north.  We sat and walked amongst them (and there “guano”) for about an hour before heading back to the ship.  There were a few leopard seals around but we did not see a kill.  We got really close to one leopard on a flow of ice.  This is not your cuddly seal; it is an ugly and mean beast.  It has a neck and head like a giant snake, with a huge mouth that wraps all around its head in a grotesque kind of “smile”.  Our guide calls them evil creatures.  They have attacked and killed people before, but that is very rare.  Robert was attacked once, but knocked it on the head and got off ok – not on this trip.

It is almost 7 pm and we leave momentarily to sleep on the ice tonight.  See you in the am.

Day Four March 21: Icebergs

DAY 4 (Monday)

We were on the deck by 7 a.m.  We are in the Antarctic Sound off the coast of main continent.  What we saw was amazing: the captain drove the ship around enormous “tabular” icebergs.  100 ft high (with another 800 ft underwater) and thousands of feet long, these icebergs are from the infamous Larson B Ice-shelf that broke off from the continent about 8 yrs ago after millions of years of being firmly attached.  Larson B was a chunk of ice larger than Connecticut that has now broken up and the pieces are drifting north.  These bergs are a beautiful but ominous sign of climate change.  The iceshelf held the thousands of glaciers on the mainland firmly in place; now the glaciers are sliding into ocean. 

We then loaded up on the Zodiacs for our first landing on the mainland of Antarctica.  Landing among hundreds of Gentoo penguins and fur seals, we climbed almost to the top of a large glacier.  The guides go first and test for crevasses.   A crevasse is a crack in the glacier and they can be hundreds of feet deep.  The problem is that the snow blows over the crevasse and creates what looks like a nice safe patch of ice to walk on, but it is not.  They staked a path around the crevasses to pretty close to the top when they stopped us because they could not find a safe path all the way to the top. 

It was much colder than yesterday, but brilliantly sunny.  By the time we left to come back the ship some weather moved in and we lost the sun.  With a storm coming in tonight, we are expecting wetter and windier conditions when we go back on land this afternoon.

Day Three: March 20: South Shetland Islands

DAY 3 (Sunday)

Two firsts this a.m.  We sighted land for the first time – the South Shetland Islands.  We are going through a passage to the other side where they say it will be calm. Second, within minutes of seeing land, we saw a pod of whales off the starboard side.  Cold, gray and rainy so far, but looks like we will pile into the Zodiacs this afternoon and go ashore.

So, a little bit about this expedition.  Sir Robert was the speaker a few years ago at a Leadership Council dinner of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).  I was a founding board member of ACORE and am now on the Advisory Board (as is Robert).  Swan has been traveling the world to raise awareness of the need to preserve Antarctica.  In 2041 (hence the name of his organization) the current Antarctic Treaty will expire.  That treaty, signed by nearly every country on earth, ensures that no one can own any part of the continent and certainly that there can be no drilling or other exploitation.  This is where the renewable energy connection comes in.  Sir Robert believes (and I agree) that if we as a planet are still addicted to fossil fuels, that there might be great pressure after 2041 to come down here and look for oil and natural gas.  If we have successfully switched to renewable energy, that pressure will not be there.

On the ship, in addition to the crew and the expedition guides, are about 25 people from various nations.  Some are with big energy companies, renewable energy companies, consulting firms, film makers and other corporate types.  My job is to develop and lead an educational program on renewable energy, climate change and corporate sustainability.  We want to help produce a team of leaders who will then make a difference through their jobs in accelerating the use of sustainable energy.

Robert is going to take this a step further.  Next year he is leading another expedition to the South Pole – using nothing but renewable energy.  No camp stoves, no generators to run communications equipment and, I believe, he will use a sailing ship to reach and leave Antarctica when his expedition is over.  Lockheed Martin is well represented on this trip.  They are helping develop the equipment for his expedition – which they think is very similar to what will need to be done to power a trip to Mars in the future.

We went ashore this afternoon to Half Moon Island – actually in the South Shetlands, not the continent proper.  We climbed to the top of the mountain on the island, dodging angry fur seals and inquisitive penguins – Gentoos and Chin Straps.   Great day, but since we cannot leave anything on land (including pee) it was touch and go by the end.  It felt great to get into the Zodiac and head back to the ship.

We are now through the peninsula and heading south. We are now in iceberg territory.  We saw a couple of Titanic-sinking types go by. Amazing.  We also passed where a tour ship sank two years ago. They made the mistake of trying to turn around too close to sea ice and hit it sideways; not good.  But no one died.  They made it to a base not far away in life boats.  We were warned tonight that we will feel bumps with sea ice; as long as we hit it straight on, the ship is designed to get through it. Weather report for tomorrow is great.  So we are to be on deck at 7 a.m. to see ice bergs and we will be going on shore right after breakfast.

DAY 2 March 19: Cape Horn

DAY 2: Saturday March 19

Unfortunately, I was asleep when we passed Cape Horn around midnight.  I’m told it looked like a towering mountain of rock in the moonlight.  We are now about halfway through the Drake Passage.  I’m told that so far (11 a.m.) this is about as good as the weather gets in the Drake.  Stormy and gray and the ship is rocking steadily – but the guides say that this is “Drake Lake”; on it’s best behavior.

Albatrosses are zooming around the ship.   But there is no perspective so it’s hard to believe these birds have a 10 foot wingspan.  They stay aloft for almost year at a time.  Landing only to breed.

Sir Robert pointed out the significance of where we are right now, heading south.  If you took off perpendicular from the ship in either direction, the next thing you would bump into is the other side of this very ship.  Again, nowhere else in the world could you do that.

If the weather stays this “good”, we should reach Antarctica by tomorrow afternoon.

Evening update: we will pass 60 degrees south at about midnight. That means we are technically in Antarctica.   We are also about an hour from the “Antarctic Convergence”; this is where the freezing cold southern ocean and the Pacific and Atlantic crash together.  Might be a bit bumpy.  Weather has picked up and more people are getting sick.   Also, we are told that we will be hit with a major storm in about two days.  Great.

Day One March 18: Ushuaia

Antarctica 2011.

Pretty remarkable start to the trip.  Boarded the ship out of Ushuaia (the southern most city in the world) about 430.  After numerous safety briefings and meeting our Russian captain, we did an abandon ship drill.  We each have full body suits that sustain life in freezing water (don’t expect we’ll need them). 

Sir Robert Swan kicked things off with a presentation on leadership.  He earlier had introduced himself at the hotel.  He told us about an expedition rule called “Bronco 5”.  Our morning meeting was to start at 10.  People wandered in a few minutes late.  Sir Robert – the first person ever to walk unassisted to both the north and south poles – told us a story about his dear friend, named “ Bronco”.  Bronco summitted Mt. Everest.   But he dawdled on the summit and could not make it down to Camp 5.  He did the highest bivouac in history near the summit. He lost all of his toes and then his oxygen froze.  The only way to turn his oxygen back on was to take off his gloves – which would mean losing his fingers.  He did it and survived, but lost all of his fingers as well.  Had he left the summit 5 minutes earlier, he would have made it.  This expedition has a “Bronco 5” rule:  when we need to be somewhere, be there five minutes early.  Punctuality matters.  No one has been late to a meeting yet.

Robert gave a presentation on his expedition across Antarctica.  It took seven years to plan and raise money.  There were some funny stories about how it all began, which is in his book.  I won’t describe it all but he and two others made to the south pole on foot.  The entire expedition took over one year.  He lost 70 pounds and his brown eyes turned to a haunting gray color, which they retain to this day.  The ship that was to take him back sank and it was an incredible story of how they finally made it back – and how they fulfilled his commitment to retrieve every bit of debris they left on the continent.  Incredible.  You have to read the book.  One person asked him how he kept sane dragging a sled everyday for three months in complete whiteness.  This was extraordinary.  He said he learned how to access memories – exact, perfect recall of any event from his life back to a memory of being one-year old (later confirmed by his mother).  He said his brain became like a video warehouse.  He could turn on anything at any time and watch it.  He retains a photographic memory.

We are about to leave the Beagle channel (Darwin came through here on the Beagle when he was only in his 20’s) into the Drake Passage.  “the Drake” is the nastiest piece of ocean in the world.  600 miles between tip of South America and Antarctica.  It is 10:30 at night an am beginning to feel this big ship rock.  We have all applied our patches or taken our dramamine.  Weather travels west to east, of course, and west of the Drake is 9000 miles of nothing.  The longest stretch of open ocean on earth.  50 ft waves can occur at any time – while hurricanes in the south Atlantic or Nor-easters in the northern atlantic occur seasonally, such weather can happen anytime without warning here.  Sailors say that “below 40 degrees south, there is no law; below 50 degrees there is no God”.  We are going to almost 70.  He also pointed out that we are the last expedition of the season (it is now fall down here).  There are no other ships out here.

This is the ocean where Shackelton spent his epic two years of survival in the early 20th century.  Robert recounted the exploits of Shackelton and Scott and Amundson.  These were the bravest most intrepid explorers in history – though the stories of Magellan and Drake were simply less well chronicled but even more extraordinary in that they did it in the 16th century with relatively small wooden boats and no modern navigation.  And they did not actually go around the Horn; they went through the Straits of Magellan (hundreds of miles north of where we are).  Drake got blown off course to Cape Horn. 

It will take us two days to cross the Drake – maybe less, since our ship – the Sea Spirit – is quite fast and very comfortable.  But no ship is immune from the magnitude of the ocean down here.  As Robert said, “than Drake and the Antarctic wants to kill you; we are fighting against that every day”.  Probably a little overly dramatic, but this is pretty damn remote and pretty damn serious.  I am counting on my ear patch.  On the top deck, where my cabin is, things are already swaying hard and we are not yet into the open ocean.  We were told to “Drake proof” our cabin – meaning nothing unsecured; everything on the floor or tied down. With that, it’s off to bed.  If I’m not too sick, will report tomorrow from the middle of the Drake.