Pitch'n'roll

Morning (or evening?) to everybody! But especially to our readers in Tel Aviv, Southampton and Maryland, of whom we were told about yesterday. You lot, do not to be selfish and share this blog with all your people, wherever they are!
 

We continue in our particular limbo, now at 43º04.3240 – 040º36.8640 and cruising at 9 kt. I don't know how you imagine us from dry land. Thirty three people on board a 53 m ship and except for meal times -and even then some people are missing-, I hardly see anybody. The officer and sailor doing their watch in the bridge (luckily those two are always there!), the fantastic team in the kitchen doing their thing, eventually I meet in the corridors one of the engineers, one of the biologists in the living room or visiting the bridge... and little else! The weather is not helping to socialise. The wind reached yesterday nearly 50 kt, and even though it was never as intense as during the storm we crossed in 2012, it affected us, because it changed to a southeasterly and we spent hours drifting: hardly making progress and keeping to the wind. The ship was nevertheless far from still, and we are all rather knackered.

Everything must be
screwed or tied up to something

 

It sounds stupid, but keeping the vertical position takes a lot of energy and everything we do needs more effort than usual. If I write from the computer in my cabin, the keyboard slips under my hands because it is on retractile tray. If I use the laptop at the acoustics lab, as I am doing now, the laptop stays because it rests on a rubber mat, but every now and then I have to hold on to the edge of the desk to avoid crossing the whole lab on my chair. All movement and actions must be tuned to the pitch and roll: opening doors, going up and down the stairs, walking, drinking... the less uncomfortable option is to lay down, and I think that's exactly what most people are doing because the ship seems to be deserted.
 

We didn't sleep well either, with a million noises in the cabins and unable to stay put on the bunk bed. I gather most of us have opted by ignoring the noises rather than doing anything about them, which is an endless task. There will always be something rolling inside a drawer. What I am definitely doing tonight is taking down all the hangers, that have spent the night stubbornly and endlessly travelling up and down the bar.

 

But now we know we will not reach our destination until Monday, which is a bit of a drag because we will lose one fishing day. We will wait another day to decide if we enter the Grand Bank to the Southeast, as usual, or from the north. We have to juggle with more issues than in former years due to the reduced scientific crew.
 

Yesterday afternoon, during one of the shakiest hours I thought that when we arrive to the Bank we will be 1700 nm from Spain. We are crossing the Atlantic on a most comfortable ship where we lack nothing, but nevertheless we start to find the pitch and roll a bit taxing. I couldn't help but thinking of Shackleton's epic 800 nm crossing of the Southern Ocean, the most unforgiving of the seas, with some of his men on board the James Caird, just about 9 m long, to go from Elefant Island to South Georgia. I firmly believe that Shackleton is the greatest explorer. Ever. He left England in 1914 with a 22 men crew, sailors and scientists, on board the Endurance. Their goal was crossing Antarctica. However, when they were very close to the continent, the ice trapped the ship. They saw how the drift took them away from land, a minor problem when a few weeks later the ice crushed their gallant ship, as they called it in that awful moment.
 

They selected the most necessary items from the little equipment that they had saved from the ship, and when the ice started to break down in summer -after all they were camped on the frozen surface of the Weddell Sea, and the noise they heard was the cracking of the ice-, they jumped into the life boats and went to Elephant Island. Shackleton was aware of the scarce possibilities of being rescued so far from their intended route, and knew that their only chance to survive was finding help rather than waiting for it. The closest inhabited place was the whaling station in Grytviken, South Georgia. The biggest of the life boats, the James Caird was modified to endure the crossing, more ballast was added to make it more stable, provisions loaded and Shackleton and a selected few started the most exciting trip in the history of exploration. In awful weather conditions, with hardly any food and least of all, hot food, never being rested or dry, sleeping rendered impossible in their wet clothes and wet reindeer sleeping bags extended over the ballast rocks. Arriving to South Georgia, a last storm forced them to sail away from the shore and land in the opposite side of the island, characterised for very rough topography and many glaciers and at the time, years away from being mapped. At this point there was no option but crossing the island on foot in the shortest time possible to avoid death by hypothermia. They arrived to Grytviken 36 hours later. The rest is another story.

 

Thus it is clear we have nothing to complaint about. Much has been written on polar exploration in the early XXth century. I strongly recommend the books written at the time, as South by Shackleton himself, and the biographies of the participants in those surveys. Shackleton's, by Roland Rutford it's on a league of its own.

 

We will be back tomorrow with more stories to share with you... have a nice Saturday!