by Tim Jarvis
Seb clung to the deck, skittering dangerously in his wet leather boots as he tied our large cooking pot to the halyard and hoisted it to the top of the mast. We radioed Australis to see if the largest metal object we possessed, atop the tallest structure we had, was visible to their radar, but the VHF refused to function either, courtesy of the same power failure that had killed the AIS. Again we borrowed Ed’s lighter to light the oil lamp in order to find the spares bag that contained the battery-operated VHF. This too was dead due to its getting wet, and a repository of spare batteries for it lay in a tin hidden somewhere else. Once we had tracked this down by candlelight, the battery-operated VHF was switched on and we contacted Australis. Ben confirmed that the radar was performing about as well as our waterproof jackets and that we were officially radar invisible. With our battery VHF becoming increasingly strained by distance from Australis, I precariously clambered up on deck and positioned our emergency light high on the mizzen mast so that at least Australis could follow us while we sorted out our problems. In keeping with the way things were going, the light also decided to malfunction as waves continued to periodically drench us. I dried it out below by the glow of the oil lamp and returned it to its position at the top of the mizzen mast, where this time it worked. Finally Australis confirmed they could at least see us, which, although an improvement, without the AIS would be completely impractical in bigger seas, or mist. More than ever we felt very alone.
Nick: along with Larso, our most accurate sailor.
Courtesy of Ed Wardle
After multiple attempts, Seb still couldn’t get the electrics to work, although Ed’s cameras continued to function. We sat huddled by the light of the oil lamp, thinking through our options. Each life jacket contained an AIS of its own with a theoretical life of twenty-four hours and apparently a four-kilometer range. If we couldn’t get the main AIS going, we could run each life jacket AIS in sequence throughout each nightly period of perhaps eight hours of darkness to enable Australis to track us. The computer screen would register one of our names rather than the boat but, apart from that, it was a good solution. Six life jackets should give us a total of eighteen nights’ coverage in the worst-case scenario. Frankly, if we weren’t at South Georgia by then, the AIS would be the least of our problems. With great anticipation we switched one on but Australis, keeping us in sight via our rear light, could only pick up the signal when they came within 400 meters of us. And that was with the life jacket AIS on deck, far higher than a man would be flailing in the dark water. It didn’t say much for the chances of either boat or individual should the worst happen.
8
THREADING THE NEEDLE
Approaching the towering cliffs of South Georgia, one of the most dangerous parts of our journey.
Courtesy of Magnus O’Grady
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.
Edward Lear, The Jumblies
The Alexandra Shackleton heeled over in the mist.
Courtesy of Magnus O’Grady
On a journey using period clothing and equipment, it seemed ironic that the six of us were sitting cramped below deck on a hundred-year-old whaler out in a dark, stormy Southern Ocean trying to fix twenty-first-century technology issues. Having been closely involved in the system design, Seb got straight on the case trying to think through what could be wrong while the rest of us “helped” him via constructive interrogation designed to spark a flash of inspiration and, better still, electricity. The cameras and the communications gear were powered by two banks of batteries separated by a voltage-sensing relay to protect the system from overcharging. As the cameras still worked, the problem could be something to do with this or the fact that in the storm we had allowed our battery-recharging unit to run out of methanol. Or perhaps the camera batteries had retained more charge and not yet run out. With our brains fuddled by lack of sleep, darkness, boat movement, and nausea, we decided to wait until daylight and, hopefully, calmer weather. We just had to hope Australis could follow a small light on a tiny boat in big waves on an enormous ocean.
We had to get the system up and running again because without it our ability to complete the expedition independently would be in serious doubt. If Australis couldn’t physically see us or pick us up on radar or AIS, we would have to abandon our bid to be the first to sail a replica James Caird using only traditional navigation, needing to resort to modern means to let Australis know where we were. It would be a crushing blow. The only upside was that we now knew how much power our batteries and AIS were consuming by how quickly our methanol cell ran dry putting power back into the system.
Our new appreciation of the range limit of the life jacket AIS units also gave us some serious food for thought. Larso had gone on watch in darkness swearing under his breath about how much of a pain in the backside they were anyway. In so doing he voiced what all of us felt. Pulling them on over a bulky, wet, gabardine jacket, straps always snagging on its buttons, while balancing on your knees in a crowded, rocking boat, head stooped low with no peripheral vision and no one to help was at best challenging and, in darkness, next to impossible. Also, due to our differing builds, we each had our own preadjusted jacket, but, as with all our gear, they all looked identical from a distance. The chances of grabbing our own jacket first go was 1:6 and those odds bore out much of the time. If someone had gone overboard and the AIS had activated, those on board Australis would have been perfectly entitled to wonder who was actually in the water.
Regardless of the danger, we decided not to use our life jackets, as the weather appeared to be marginally improving. Nick had some misgivings about aspects of their preattached safety lines anyway, in particular the fact that the longer of the two lines on each jacket was too long and got in the way, while in a capsize the shorter safety line might prevent the helmsman from finding the air pocket in the top of the cockpit in the upturned boat, attached as it was to the deck.
The wind was lessening, the seas were beginning to peak, and fewer waves broke into the boat. But snow fell heavily throughout the night, coating each helmsman with a layer several centimeters thick on the windward side of his head. The sun momentarily revealed itself through the breaking clouds for the first time since we’d left Elephant Island only to sink spectacularly, large and red, into the sea, cloaking us in darkness with, eventually, just a handful of stars bright enough to shine through. Several hours after the sun sank beneath the waves, the moon appeared, its yellow light shimmering magically on the black, uneven surface of the sea. For a group of tired men whose nerves had become frayed during the previous forty-eight hours, it was a godsend and reminded us why we were out here.
Suddenly I was struck by the differences between a storm on land and one at sea. I had spent five months exploring the desolate interior of Antarctica on foot, pulling a sled all the way to the South Pole and beyond, and living in a tent high on the windy polar plateau. The winds there blew with a force that easily rivaled or eclipsed what we had experienced here on the sea. The key difference, however, was that the land surface didn’t change as storms raged above you. Here on the ocean you got it from both sides—from the elements above as well as the surface over which you traveled that changed unrecognizably. Here there was literally nowhere to hide.
Every now and then we were reminded that what was an alien ocean to us was home to many.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis
Larso and I were on deck in the dawn light when a loud blowing startled us both. We turned to see a massive glistening form appear only an arm’s length away, gliding effortlessly through the water and virtually brushing the side of the Alexandra Shackleton. We could even see the barnacles glistening on the back of this southern right whale as it surfaced, its huge form rotating to see us better with one eye out of the water. There was a certain irony in having a whale surface to satisfy its curiosity about these men aboard an old whaling boat. It certainly wouldn’t have done so a hundred years ago, or even fifty for
that matter, when those men so admired by Shackleton were still decimating whale populations. Even this whale’s name was indicative of its value to man. They were called the “right” whale because they contained a lot of oil and didn’t sink when harpooned, which made their retrieval easy. This thrillingly intimate encounter with this giant of the deep was wonderful. It felt as though the whale might have popped up to ask, “You made it through that storm all right, then?”
The cold night turned into a cold, crisp early morning with a light frost forming on the Alexandra Shackleton. We weren’t, however, experiencing as cold a journey as Shackleton had by this point. For him a treacherous coat of ice developed on the Caird, increasing in thickness as each day passed. By day eight the ice had caused the loss of two of their four oars and threatened to capsize the boat due to its increased and uneven weight. As Worsley recalled,
Something had to be done, and quickly, so we took it in turns to crawl out with an axe and chop off the ice. What a job! The boat leaped and kicked like a mad mule; she was covered fifteen inches deep in a casing of ice like a turtle-back, with slush all over where the last sea was freezing.
It must have seemed like a silent, tenacious predator circling and then smothering its prey.
Thankfully, and in no small part due to the fact that our journey took place three months earlier than Shackleton’s, we were not affected by ice accumulation. On the land-based polar trips I have done, however, it is fluctuating temperatures and wetness that so often cause the worst problems. Snow melting and then refreezing in wet, windy conditions can quickly result in the onset of hypothermia. That was what we were experiencing now. Sometimes in extreme cold I’ve known ice to form on clothing in a way that effectively seals it and prevents wind from getting through. But as we weren’t likely to experience freezing, dry conditions, we couldn’t expect such a positive side effect.
By late morning of day four the sea was improbably calm and the temperature the warmest of the trip. The previous night’s red-sky sunset had delivered what it promised. By noon, the anger of the sea during the previous two days had completely vanished and it was now like a millpond, our doubts and difficulties as hard to recall now as the sea that had caused them. Wasn’t this always the way? Good and bad times come and go, but while the former reign, it’s as if the latter never existed. The reverse applies just the same, and in the throes of that storm, we had thought it would never end.
One thing we knew for sure, the calm wouldn’t last, so the boat became a hive of activity above and below deck, with Seb taking advantage of the calm and light to revisit our power issue. His final take on things was that we should remove the two batteries in the bow from the circuit and reconnect a new wiring loom by literally twisting the exposed wires together to short-circuit the system back to life. This was met with some understandable trepidation from Ed, who had visions of his camera bank going up in smoke. Seb, however, was confident that no harm would come to the camera battery bank, and on that basis I told him to go ahead.
Improbably calm: our concern of the previous days now seemed difficult to recall.
Courtesy of Jo Stewart
With predictable difficulty, I dug out a new methanol container from the bowels of the boat and connected it to the system. I followed the instructions on the last page of the troubleshooting section that more or less said: “If you’re reading this you’ve probably made the unforgivable mistake of allowing the system to run out of methanol.” I consoled myself with the fact that the average person wouldn’t likely be using one of these systems in the tiny confines of a hundred-year-old boat in a storm down in the Furious Fifties. But it wasn’t going to solve the problem.
Having connected our respective parts of the system, we were satisfied we had done all we could and sat back to take stock. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of a thriller where the pliers hover over the green and red wires of a bomb before one is cut, we switched the system on, hoping in our case for light, not dark. After a couple of seconds’ delay, the AIS panel and VHF lights came to life, followed by the cameras. Ben confirmed he could again “see” us and calm returned on all fronts. Overcoming this latest problem gave us tremendous confidence and had forced us to understand more about our systems into the bargain. Add to this the fact that the Alexandra Shackleton had survived the storm well, and we had some great positives to build on.
By midmorning the sun had melted the accumulated snow on the deck and it became a Chinese laundry of wet reindeer skins and sodden boots. As our little boat sat becalmed in the doldrums beneath a blue sky, Baz cooked below while the rest of us caught up on sleep or tried to track down hats and gloves that had been lost in the bilges since we left Elephant Island. So debilitating and difficult had the conditions been until now that most “nonessential” activities—such as eating, drinking, and attending to personal hygiene—had fallen by the wayside. Nick’s log entry read: “Zero wind. Full spring clean. All fed and watered. Baz cooked. Clothes dried. Larso sunburnt. All happy. Some personal space re-established. Teeth brushed.” Along with describing the conditions, Larso’s log declared, “Farting a good sign.” It was a serious point. Up until now no one had eaten enough to generate gas.
In the meantime, there was another source of gas on board. Worryingly our port-side water barrel, one of the two old whisky barrels that we’d filled at Arctowski with glacial water, smelled very eggy and had, we decided, become contaminated. How it had happened was a mystery. This unwelcome development provided another extraordinary, unplanned parallel between our journey and Shackleton’s. One of his water casks was stove in slightly when the Stancomb Wills, which was towing it to the James Caird ready for their departure, was driven by the swell onto some rocks, rendering the water within “brackish.” This proved to be a serious problem as it led to the crew being dangerously short of water later in their journey. We needed to keep using the water from our affected barrel, but planned to boil it for use in meals and hot drinks rather than drink it cold. However, the combination of our ever-malfunctioning Primus and our impatience meant, I suspect, that we often stopped short of letting the water reach true boiling point. Since most of us already felt slightly unwell, it was difficult to tell if we suffered any ill effects from the water.
The Primus stove on the James Caird, as with us, played a vital role in maintaining both energy levels and morale. In Worsley’s words, “It was [Shackleton’s] principle to fight the cold, and constant soaking, by ample hot food.” As a result, he recalled, “Sir Ernest had the Primus going day and night as long as we could stand the fumes, then it would be put out for an hour. This and a generous drink of life-giving hot milk every four hours, at the relief of the watches, kept all hands from any ill effects.” We too used our stove as often as we could, with Baz being the Crean of our group in terms of both his cooking and his uncomplaining, stoic nature. Even though he probably suffered the worst seasickness among us, he was always ready to help others.
After a brief visit from the Raw TV crew by Zodiac to collect some film, the next priority for us was working out where we actually were. We could only really make an educated guess based on dead reckoning of our speed and direction of travel. In order to get a decent sun sight, the disc of the sun needed to be visible in the sextant, but now a bank of high clouds was rolling in from the west and we knew the clear skies would likely be gone by noon Greenwich Mean Time, when sightings could be most easily calculated. Worsley’s poetic words yet again seemed to describe our conditions, with the exception of the past few hours of blue skies: “Never a gleam of sun or stars showed through the dull gray or else storm-driven pall of clouds that in these latitudes seems ceaselessly and miserably to shroud the bright blue sky and the cheerful light of sun or moon.” This was one of the most difficult aspects of being out here—we were constantly at the mercy of the elements, not knowing what weather was coming, nor in which direction it would allow us to travel and how fast or safely.
The on-board laundry. Trying to dry our
jackets on deck.
Courtesy of Skye Whelan
Calmer weather draws small smiles from Nick and Baz.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis
In the meantime, while it was great that the sun was drying our possessions on deck, we weren’t getting anywhere. The sails sat listless and our positive mood deflated as the clouds slowly moved in. I realized just how important it was in a project of this enormity, and involving a team of this caliber, to feel that we were constantly taking positive steps toward our target. I realized too how much I had begun to rely on the momentum that can be sailing’s reward. It moves you toward your objective even as you sleep—complete anathema to the sled pulling I was used to on expeditions, as a sled progresses only when you pull it. While you sleep you go nowhere; in fact, on a journey to the North Pole, you often go backward while sleeping with the southerly drift of the ice. I chided myself for slipping into the mind-set where I expected to get something for nothing and resolved to focus instead on our achievements to date and the positives of our current circumstances. We were drier than we had been for days and the sun was about to tell us where we were, if the clouds could only keep away for just a bit longer. Plus, as dangerous and uncomfortable as it had been, the storm had carried us hundreds of kilometers toward South Georgia.