4 February 2007
by Thomas Mulcaire
SA Agulhas, 69 deg 54 S 02 deg 40 W
I got a fright around midday when I was called to the bridge over the ship PA system. It sounded like an emergency and so I rushed up the stairs. When I got up to the bridge the captain, the radio engineer and one of the helicopter pilots all look at me stern-faced and directed me to the radio, which then lost contact with SANAE. There was a tense few moments whilst Ralf tried to re-establish contact during which no-one said a word to me. My thoughts drifted through terrible scenarios of an accident or death at home to the Groundhog catching fire. But when we finally did make contact with SANAE it turned out that a package had arrived for me from the Russian base Novolazarevskaya and they wanted to know if they should put it on the last helicopter out of SANAE. I worked out that it must be the last of the material that Honor Harger of radioqualia had organized for the radio station and that Siphiwe had managed to get it to Bernard Gaum of ALCI who put it onto the one of the last Ilyushin cargo flights into Dronning Maud Land this season so I told them to give the package to Zama who will be looking after our projects during the winter. The package would have had quite a journey over the last few weeks, lost in transit somewhere in Europe, it arrived in Cape Town the day after I met the GulfStream at the Norwegian base Troll on 16 Jan with the what we thought would be the last opportunity for us to get material from contributors around the world, it then sat in Cape Town until it was jumped on to the Ilyushin flight to Novolazarevskaya, and from Novo it would have been transferred onto a Basler flight which dropped it off at SANAE on the way back from the German base Neumayer, when it stopped to med-evac Struan who has to have an urgent operation on the leg he broke trying to kite-surf over SANAE two weeks ago.
At 17h30 the Agulhas turned off the ice shelf and we are heading home. I went up to the bridge after dinner, the heading was 359 deg, almost due north. The radio engineer, Ralf, who was on the watch, told me our course will be as direct as possible to Cape Town. But even as we spoke leads in the pack ice directly in front of us closed in and within 10 minutes the first engineer, the ice captain and the ship's captain were on the bridge scanning the pack in conference through their binoculars. We may yet have to do some scouting east and west to find a way through the ice which is still plentiful even as we head into late summer. Still, despite the beauty of the pack and the bergy bits and the icebergs all around us I don't think there is one passenger who is sad to be leaving Antarctica. It has been a good but a very long trip. The festive mood of the past few days continued last night with a party in the bar, and singing of an Afrikaans song called "Hoe (or Wie) Ry die Perd?" (How (or Who) rides the horse) which apparently could be heard two decks up in the officers quarters at 3 this morning and which got us all pre-dinner lecture from the captain, a ban on daytime sales of alcohol and the restriction of bar hours from 8-10pm for the remainder of the trip. The new measures seem a bit harsh on all of us, I was asleep at the time and as for the noise I didn't hear a thing despite our cabin being only two doors away from the bar. As for our crew, Adam is spending a lot of time up on the monkey deck honing his bird shooting skills with his new telephoto lens, First has been sleeping almost continuously (last night he got up for dinner after 27 hours in bed), and Amanda and I have been watching a lot of movies. I think we all needed to unwind after the past week which was high pressure getting the Groundhog up before we flew out. My unwinding will be short-lived though. I still have quite a lot of official work to do next week, as a team leader I have to write a report to the Science Coordinator and SANAP management on our expedition and activities, and I have to complete the final version of our Initial Environmental Evaluation for the next Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, both before we get off the boat on 15 February.
It is Independence Day in Angola today.