Kayaking the Islands of South Georgia by Michael Powers - When my Danish friend Olaf Malver rang me up and asked me if I wanted to join a select group of paddlers going to Antarctica for an exploratory sea kayaking trip, I ran to pack my cold-weather paddling gear. Olaf personifies the spirit of his Viking ancestors, having climbed over 200 mountains on three continents. In recent years he has turned to sea kayaking, with a special passion for leading trips to remote regions and extreme climates. Any paddling adventure with him was bound to be fun. It had long been a dream of mine to explore the islands and the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent of Antarctica, yet the time, expense and logistical problems involved in reaching this remote wilderness had made this dream unreachable. Where there were previously few options for transportation to Antarctica, the situation has now changed. With the end of the Cold War, many highly specialized resources have become available for scientific expeditions and adventure travel. For example, the MS Academik Shuleykin, a 235-foot Russian research vessel with a hull strengthened for ice and an Arctic-seasoned crew, recently appeared in Argentinian waters and began offering its services to eco-travelers and research teams wishing to travel to Antarctica. This ship would provide the passage for our group to this previously nearly inaccessible landscape. In January 1998, the midpoint of the austral summer, I joined a half-dozen paddling friends of Olaf in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. Jonathan Calvert came from Texas, Larry Rice from Illinois, Dana Isherwood, Lou Gibbs, Phil Rasori and I came from northern California, and Olaf's old friend Jan Jantzen flew in from Copenhagen. Stowing our folding boats onboard the Russian ship, we set off down the rain-swept Beagle Channel, bound for Antarctica. That night we entered Drakes Passage, long regarded by mariners as one of the most dangerous places in the world to sail a boat. But in the steel-hulled Shuleykin, equipped with powerful twin engines and modern navigational equipment, we felt safe. We set a course toward South Georgia Island, 1125 nautical miles to the southeast. We soon discovered that the stories we had all heard about this Southern Ocean were not exaggerated. These seas seemed charged with conditions more immense, more powerful than those through which any of us had ever drawn a kayak paddle. Only here, between 50 and 60 degrees south latitude, does a continuous band of open water encircle the earth. Vast tropical seas stand face-to-face with the frigid polar ice, unrestrained by any land mass. To further intensify the situation, these winds and currents become constricted as they squeeze between the southern tip of South America and the north-thrusting Antarctic Peninsula. The next morning I emerged on deck and gazed out over the tempestuous vista that surrounded us. A seemingly endless succession of ocean waves, some four or five stories high, raced along with us in an easterly direction. I wondered how the Shuleykin would handle these gigantic waves when it was time for us to return west and face the onslaught head-on. The scene conjured up memories of rapids on a white-water river, on an oceanic scale. The words of explorer Robert Meithe came to mind, who once observed, "Cape Horn is the place where the devil made the biggest mess he could." For three and a half days and nights we surged along at 12 knots, the powerful wind, waves and currents at our backs. For those of us who were heading to Antarctica for the first time, the ocean around us seemed vast and utterly wild. From my favorite vantage deck at the bow, I gazed out over the ever-changing panorama of seething seas and sky for hours. In the evenings I would go down to the lecture room on the second deck to learn more about this fascinating world from lectures and slide shows that the American and European naturalists and historians onboard presented. There was also an extraordinary series of videos, Life in the Freezer, that the British had produced about Antarctica. Up on the bridge deck there was a library stuffed with books about natural history and the exploration of the area. When I could absorb no more information, there was a sauna back down on deck two that the crew kept super-heated, hotter than any sauna I had ever known. There the Russians introduced me to their custom of rubbing honey on their perspiring bodies, claiming that it was great for the skin. At about 54° S, we began to sense a drop in the air temperature, a sign that we were crossing the Antarctic Convergence. The naturalists explained that this is a region where deep currents from the north collide with frigid, denser polar ones, forcing the nutrient-laden waters to the surface. The variety and concentration of aquatic and air-borne wildlife confirmed that we had entered one of the richest feeding grounds in the world. Pelagic birds, some of which I had never seen in the northern hemisphere, were much in evidence here: pintados, prions, southern giant petrels and royal albatrosses with a wingspan of up to 12 feet. Three hundred sixty million birds of 20 to 30 species are estimated to migrate through or live fulltime in Antarctica, including six species of albatross and countless flocks of agile, swift-moving penguins. The penguins displayed remarkable teamwork as they darted, dove and leapt along the surface of the sea in pursuit of prey. We also spotted fin and humpbacked whales, seagoing fur seals and pods of orcas and bottlenose dolphins that had come to join the feeding frenzy. Paul Konrad, an editor from Wildbird magazine who was also a passenger on the Shuleykin, explained how the whales and dolphins came here to feed on the immense quantities of krill that swarmed invisibly through the water around us. The day before we were due to arrive at South Georgia Island, Olaf announced, "It's time to put our boats together!" But a 20-knot, near-freezing wind was whistling outside, so we tried assembling the first of our three folding kayaks inside the ship's bar. Alas, the big doubles proved much too long for that cozy sanctuary. We moved out onto the wind-swept deck, clutching the various pieces of our craft tightly to prevent them from being blown overboard. The ship had slowed down now, and big waves were rolling up and overtaking us from astern. A Russian crewman cautioned us always to keep a firm grip on a guardrail whenever we moved near the edge of the rolling, pitching deck. A glance at the seething sea racing past and no one required a second warning. The aluminum pieces of the boat frames were a struggle to fit together with our numb fingers, but by nightfall our three kayaks, as well as a unique collapsible white-water canoe of Norwegian design that photojournalist Larry Rice had brought along, were all lashed down securely on the aft deck, ready for launching. Later that night, I visited the bridge and found the officers on watch gathered around the ship's radio, following the weather reports closely. A big cyclonic depression had developed 250 miles to the northwest, but it appeared to be moving away from us. Small icebergs were scattered across the radar screen, and a sizable one loomed about six miles out at 2:00. At 12 knots and surging even faster in these following seas, even the Shuleykin with its hull strengthened for ice, could not risk a collision with something that size. Back down in the lecture room, Russian-born naturalist Peter Ourusoff began briefing us about the wildlife we would encounter around South Georgia Island. "Leopard seals are widely regarded as the most dangerous killers of wildlife in Antarctica, yet it's the big fur seal bulls in herds on the beaches that tend to be aggressive toward anything, including human beings, who wander into their territory." We would soon find out that he was not exaggerating. By dawn the next morning, the Shuleykin was at anchor in Grytviken Bay at 54° 17' S, 36° 30' W, offshore from an historical Norwegian whaling station long since shut down. Years of Antarctic storms had battered and crumbled the row of wooden structures ringing the little cove. Long before the seal hunters had come, the great British navigator Captain James Cook had anchored here when he discovered South Georgia Island in 1775. The sky was overcast, but the wind was light and the weather seemed to be holding steady. At a signal from Olaf, we pulled on our dry suits and launched our kayaks from a landing platform that the crew had lowered down to the water. We gathered into formation and began to paddle towards shore, where a jagged range of ice-clad mountains loomed above. A flock of swift macaroni penguins dove and leapt nearby, porpoising to get a better look at us. My paddling partner, Lou Gibbs, and I landed our kayak on a narrow strip of sandy beach near the crumbling remains of the whaling station, while the other paddlers explored the waterfront by kayak. We knew that the legendary Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton was buried here somewhere. In 1915, after his ship the Endurance became ice-bound in the Weddell Sea and was ground into splinters, he and his men subsisted for months on pack ice. When the pack ice finally broke up, they sailed their two lifeboats to uninhabited Elephant Island, where they found scant shelter from the Antarctic weather in a rocky cave. Shackleton then took a few of his men and sailed 800 miles in the most seaworthy of the two boats, through the storm- and iceberg-filled Southern Ocean. Their long sea journey climaxed in a surf landing on the blustery west coast of South Georgia Island. Even then, however, their trials were not over. Protected only by the tattered rags that remained of their clothing, they climbed across the glacier-covered mountains to reach the whaling station at Grytviken. Incredibly, not one of the Endurance crew perished during the eighteen months they were lost in Antarctica. When a journalist back in England asked Shackleton if he considered his expedition to be a success or a failure, he replied, "A successful expedition, sir, is one from which all hands return alive." Down the beach from where we landed, a herd of fur seals watched our every move. When I pulled a camera out of a waterproof case and took a few steps in their direction, a half-ton bull with inch-long canine teeth responded by charging straight toward me. I leapt over low hummocks of sedge grass, making a hasty and undignified retreat. A few minutes' walk away, we came upon Shackleton's grave. There, in the company of a few headstones from early Norwegian whalers, sat a stone marking the final resting place of this intrepid explorer. Engraved on the stone was a fragment of a poem by the English poet Robert Browning: "...that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life prize." From there we wandered through the ruins of the old whaling station. Approaching the edge of the grouping of buildings, we were surprised to find a sailboat tied up at an old whaler's dock. Tim and Pauline Carr greeted us warmly. They had sailed all the way to South Georgia Island from England on their small craft. The boat appeared impossibly small (only ten or twelve meters in length) to have made that long journey. They invited us to come aboard, and Pauline shared some harrowing stories of her own encounters with the fur seals, confessing that she had taken to carrying a big stick when she hiked around the island. Brandishing the stick usually discouraged an attack, but not always. "Last week I was walking down the beach, and this big brute lumbered up and grabbed the business end of my staff in his mouth. We played tug-of-war for quite a few moments, but he finally let go." She warned us about beaches farther along the coast where the really big herds of fur seal were entrenched. "Two sea kayakers came here a few months ago, after paddling back from Hound Bay. They tried to make camp there for the night, but the seals were so aggressive they had to get back in their kayaks and paddle on to another beach." We returned to our kayak and paddled northward along the rocky, corrugated shoreline that stretched northward beyond Grytviken cove. As we approached each beach, we could smell the distinctive, heady aroma of sea animals that feed on a diet of fish and krill. Almost every landing spot we found was packed with penguins and herds of fur seals. We paddled back to the Shuleykin before dark. The ship weighed anchor and moved farther down the coast during the night. For the next three days we explored the protected eastern side of the island, launching each morning and paddling the most interesting stretches of the rugged shoreline. Having unladen boats made it easy to land and launch on the steep, rocky beaches. After paddling all day in the biting cold, it was a relief to return to the haven of the Shuleykin each night. A hot sauna and a warm meal seemed preferable to remaining ashore in the midst of the territorial fur seals after dark. One morning when a moderate swell was running, Jonathan capsized in the icy water during an attempt to launch from the mother ship. After ducking back into his cabin for a dry pair of socks, he got back in his kayak and launched successfully. "That water was a bit cold," he admitted later. "But I'm glad it happened here, within easy reach of my dry cabin, and not in Greenland where Olaf and I camped out of our kayaks continuously for ten days." The next day we entered a large, sweeping inlet named St. Andrews Bay. A mile or so of broad beach swept around to rocky points at either side, bisected by a large, silt-colored stream that rushed from the mountains above, down to the sea. Dozens of fur and elephant seals guarded all but a small section of the beach, but we aimed for that spot and were able to land without incident. Every stretch of beach not fully occupied by seals was covered by juvenile and adult king penguins. Both sexes of the stately kings sport vivid golden yellow markings on the sides of their heads, similar to the emperor penguins that live on the Antarctic mainland. They waddled about, uttering a medley of hoots, squeaks and trumpet sounds, and waving their flipper wings emphatically to resolve territorial disputes. Their nesting sites extended along the banks of the river as well, and up into the hills above. The naturalists onboard the Shuleykin had told us that this colony alone probably numbered over 200,000 birds. For the most part they seemed unperturbed by our presence, although we were careful not to blunder into their nesting areas. The skies above the penguin rookery were filled with circling, predatory skua gulls. As I watched, a pair of powerful gulls swooped down on a nest that a penguin had stepped away from for a moment and devoured its unguarded egg. We followed the river up into a steep-walled canyon in the mountains above, where hiking on the loose rock became increasingly difficult. We spotted a herd of wild reindeer, descendants of animals that whalers had brought from Norway nearly a century ago. They were the only land-based mammals we saw on South Georgia Island. They appeared wary and rather weatherworn, a small vestige of man's early presence on the island like the old whaling station at Grytviken. Our final day paddle along the coast of South Georgia Island led us deep into Drygalski Fjord, near the southernmost tip of the island. Paddling into the fjord was like entering into a flooded and frozen Yosemite Valley. Glacial ice, instead of waterfalls, flowed silently down from the towering cliffs above our heads. The mountains rose up steeply from the sea to form a continuous range of sharp-edged peaks that reminded me of the Alps. Even here in the fjord, each time we paddled around an exposed point, we felt a sudden increase in the energy of the ocean swells and wind that were wrapping around from the south. I shuddered when I contemplated what kayaking along the exposed, storm-battered western side of the island would be like. Olaf had told us about his friends, an American and two Australians, who came here last year and tried to paddle all the way around the island. They started up north by crossing over to Bird Island and then proceeded south along the west coast of the main island. Conditions quickly grew so intense that they had to land through big surf and rocks and portage back across the mountains to reach the relatively protected northeast coast again. They then paddled down to the southeast tip of the island, past where we were now, and tried to make it around Cape Disappointment. Once again, when they reached the fully exposed side of the island, breaking waves and howling winds forced them back. At a signal from Olaf, the group headed to a beach at the back of a small, rocky cove. A herd of fur seals was gathered around in a circle, watching two bulls who stood facing each other, lunging at each other and roaring. We assumed that since they were busy fighting among themselves they wouldn't pay any attention to us, so we landed. But when a young bull shuffled over and tried to nip Phil Rasori on the butt, we decided it was time to get back on the water and continue exploring the fjord. Reboarding the Shuleykin that evening, we headed west around Cape Disappointment. For the first time, we were headed straight into the full force of the Antarctic weather. While sailing in following seas earlier, the bow of the ship had risen thirty feet above the water; now it became engulfed in white water each time we collided with a big oncoming swell. None of my paddling companions voiced any regrets about the fact that our boats were lashed down on the aft deck again. I made my way back to the fantail and gazed at a jagged row of deep blue mountain peaks, slowly vanishing into the darkness behind us. I could see why the early explorers had described South Georgia Island as "the Himalayas of the Southern Ocean." Throughout the night I was awakened by grinding sounds and shuddering sensations echoing through the ship. The captain ordered our forward speed reduced, first to 10 knots, then even slower, as trained eyes constantly scanned the sea ahead. Most feared by Antarctic seamen were growlers, low, dense masses of ice that lie mostly beneath the surface of the sea and are nearly invisible. But apparently the ice pack wasn't yet thick enough to be a threat to the tough skin of our ship, and we plowed slowly onward. The next morning we awoke to a sea filled with millions of broken pieces of ice the size of pianos or smaller, interspersed with larger, glistening blue icebergs. Our trip leaders described this as merely "brash ice" conditions, and reassured us that it posed no threat to the thick steel hull of the Shuleykin. Olle Carlsson, a Swedish naturalist and one of that extraordinary breed of folks who feel compelled to return, year after year, to Antarctica, observed that the El Niño cycle had brought exceptionally heavy ice conditions to the Southern Ocean this summer season. "For centuries," he explained, "a river of ice has flowed away from Antarctica in all directions into the sea." Scientists estimate that more than 348 cubic miles of icebergs calve away from the continent each year, from a vast ice cap that is nearly 5000 meters thick in places and comprises 70 percent of the world's fresh water. The next afternoon, as we arrived at the South Orkney Islands, two dagger-like peaks rose up in a lowering sky. "I doubt they've ever been climbed," reflected Olaf, staring up at the ice-covered pinnacles. We gathered on the deck, hoping we would be able to launch our boats, but as we entered Gibbon Bay on Coronation Island, pack ice driven by strong westerly winds grated ominously against the armored flanks of the Shuleykin, ruling out any chance of paddling. We moved around to the lee side of the weatherworn point, but found the wind still howling, and the brash ice just as thick as before. Returning to Gibbon Bay, we spotted a jagged lead that had now opened in the ice, leading toward shore. Still, Jonathan Chester, the expedition's leader and a veteran of many long Antarctic journeys, remained uneasy. He was concerned that a shift in wind direction might slam the lead shut as quickly as it had opened, trapping any kayakers who had paddled away from the ship. We settled for a fast run toward shore in a Zodiac to get a closer look at the wildlife there. Twenty minutes later, we approached a powerfully built, ten-foot-long leopard seal resting on top of an ice floe. As I stared into his glistening black eyes, I recalled the riveting account I'd read of two of Shackleton's men being attacked by one of these animals during the months they were stranded on the drifting pack ice. A huge leopard seal had pursued one of the terrified men, first atop the ice and then by diving into the water and following the man's shadow as he ran across the ice. Then the leopard seal burst to the surface ahead of him and charged again. Fortunately, Frank Wild, Shackleton's second-in-command, arrived with a gun at that moment and shot the big carnivore as it turned to charge him. From the South Orkneys, we continued southwest across the Weddell Sea toward the mainland of Antarctica. About halfway across, when everyone had become accustomed again to the steady droning of the ship's engines and the rhythmic rolling in the open sea, a pod of orcas surfaced near the ship. The captain immediately ordered the engines reduced to idle, and passengers and crew rushed on deck. The sleek, powerful cetaceans repeatedly burst to the surface, the sound of their explosive breathing clearly audible. Their big dorsal fins knifed across the surface of the sea and their glistening black backs flexed as they swam. They were obviously aware of the ship looming above them, but, like most of the other wildlife we encountered in Antarctica, they seemed completely unconcerned by our presence. A half-hour later, the whales dove and vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. As we approached Hope Bay on the relatively sheltered eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, I sprinted up to the bridge to get the latest weather information. Like all of the sea kayakers on board, I was praying that the powerful winds that had been blowing since we left South Georgia Island would fall off. Still, conditions remained unsettled as we drew near the mainland. The wind blew steadily at about 20 knots with occasional higher gusts, and the surface of the sea was covered with whitecaps. Jonathan decided it was too dangerous to launch the kayaks. Once again, we resorted to a Zodiac ride to shore. When we saw the icy surf and howling wind that the crew had to negotiate to get us ashore, however, we once again appreciated Jonathan's judgment. We stepped ashore on the Antarctic continent, where a rookery of Adele penguins huddled on a small, windswept, rocky beach. The omnipresent predatory skuas circled watchfully overhead. Within moments of our arrival, the wind began gusting even more strongly and the surf crashing on the beach seemed to be steadily growing more powerful, so everyone made a dash for the Zodiac. We made it back out through the surf, but had to turn quickly to avoid a football field-sized iceberg that the wind was driving between us and the mother ship. If we had been in the folding kayaks, it would have been very tough, perhaps impossible, to get off that beach and punch through the six-foot shore break. That night we cleared the Antarctic Sound and headed north towards the South Shetland Islands. The weather seemed to be settling down at last. We arrived at Baily Head on the west coast of Deception Island, about 120 miles north of continental Antarctica, early in the morning of February 8. The ship's charts revealed a unique, ring-shaped island: a circle of volcanic hills and mountains surrounding a flooded caldera. Already in our dry suits, seven of us assembled on the fantail in the soft pastel light before dawn. There was a moderate swell running, and the weather to the northeast was clear. Olaf, Dana, Jonathan, Philip, Jan, canoeist Larry and I all launched our boats from the lowered platform. We turned north, toward a pair of dramatic sea stacks that our map designated as "Sewing Machine" (a massive, box-shaped rock) and "Needle" (a slender spire of stone that rose about fifty feet above the surface of the sea). Olaf remained alert for breaking waves or tricky currents as we approached the two edifices of gray, polished granite, but everyone passed through the gap between them without a problem. We continued along the coast, paddling through glassy seas, and rounded a final point of north-thrusting land. Shielded now from the prevailing western swells, we were able to kayak right up to the base of the palisade of brown and olive-colored cliffs that rose nearly straight up, to a height of about 300 feet above the water. Hundreds of sea birds, mostly gulls and cape petrels, circled in the sky above or peered down at us from their nests on the ledges high above. We came to a hundred-foot-wide opening in the cliffs, beyond which we could see the island's flooded inner caldera surrounded by snow-covered mountains. We soon discovered why the early sailors had named this Neptune's Bellows. The wind whistled through the narrow channel, most likely katabatic winds generated by icefields around the caldera. I remembered Olle's description of katabatic winds he had experienced around mountains in Antarctica, rising from 5 to 75 mph in a matter of minutes. Luckily, the winds remained moderate that day, and we slipped through the Bellows without incident. Ringing the caldera, buildings and machinery that had once digested cetaceans now lay crushed and scattered by the repeated onslaughts of mud and lava. Volcanic eruptions had rocked the island for years, forcing the British and Norwegians to abandon their whaling operations there long ago. We paddled deeper into the caldera, toward a beach where clouds of steam rose up from geo-thermal springs and hung suspended in the cold, still air. Approaching a cloud of steam on a nearby beach, we found a pool of heated water bubbling up invitingly. Without bothering to strip off my dry suit, I lay down, immersing myself up to my neck. After hours of kayaking, the warmth soaking into my tired muscles felt wonderful. It was a satisfying conclusion to kayaking at last among the wild, beautiful islands of Antarctica. Michael Powers is a photojournalist who specializes in paddling in wild and remote areas of the world. He and fellow Tsunami Ranger Eric Soares have completed a book, Extreme Sea Kayaking, published in the spring of 1999 by Ragged Mountain Press Sea Kayaking South Georgia http://www.seakayakermag.com/feb99/antarctica.htm Another Kayaking page
Kayaking the Islands of South Georgia by Michael Powers - When my Danish friend Olaf Malver rang me up and asked me if I wanted to join a select group of paddlers going to Antarctica for an exploratory sea kayaking trip, I ran to pack my cold-weather paddling gear. Olaf personifies the spirit of his Viking ancestors, having climbed over 200 mountains on three continents. In recent years he has turned to sea kayaking, with a special passion for leading trips to remote regions and extreme climates. Any paddling adventure with him was bound to be fun. It had long been a dream of mine to explore the islands and the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent of Antarctica, yet the time, expense and logistical problems involved in reaching this remote wilderness had made this dream unreachable. Where there were previously few options for transportation to Antarctica, the situation has now changed. With the end of the Cold War, many highly specialized resources have become available for scientific expeditions and adventure travel. For example, the MS Academik Shuleykin, a 235-foot Russian research vessel with a hull strengthened for ice and an Arctic-seasoned crew, recently appeared in Argentinian waters and began offering its services to eco-travelers and research teams wishing to travel to Antarctica. This ship would provide the passage for our group to this previously nearly inaccessible landscape. In January 1998, the midpoint of the austral summer, I joined a half-dozen paddling friends of Olaf in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. Jonathan Calvert came from Texas, Larry Rice from Illinois, Dana Isherwood, Lou Gibbs, Phil Rasori and I came from northern California, and Olaf's old friend Jan Jantzen flew in from Copenhagen. Stowing our folding boats onboard the Russian ship, we set off down the rain-swept Beagle Channel, bound for Antarctica. That night we entered Drakes Passage, long regarded by mariners as one of the most dangerous places in the world to sail a boat. But in the steel-hulled Shuleykin, equipped with powerful twin engines and modern navigational equipment, we felt safe. We set a course toward South Georgia Island, 1125 nautical miles to the southeast. We soon discovered that the stories we had all heard about this Southern Ocean were not exaggerated. These seas seemed charged with conditions more immense, more powerful than those through which any of us had ever drawn a kayak paddle. Only here, between 50 and 60 degrees south latitude, does a continuous band of open water encircle the earth. Vast tropical seas stand face-to-face with the frigid polar ice, unrestrained by any land mass. To further intensify the situation, these winds and currents become constricted as they squeeze between the southern tip of South America and the north-thrusting Antarctic Peninsula. The next morning I emerged on deck and gazed out over the tempestuous vista that surrounded us. A seemingly endless succession of ocean waves, some four or five stories high, raced along with us in an easterly direction. I wondered how the Shuleykin would handle these gigantic waves when it was time for us to return west and face the onslaught head-on. The scene conjured up memories of rapids on a white-water river, on an oceanic scale. The words of explorer Robert Meithe came to mind, who once observed, "Cape Horn is the place where the devil made the biggest mess he could." For three and a half days and nights we surged along at 12 knots, the powerful wind, waves and currents at our backs. For those of us who were heading to Antarctica for the first time, the ocean around us seemed vast and utterly wild. From my favorite vantage deck at the bow, I gazed out over the ever-changing panorama of seething seas and sky for hours. In the evenings I would go down to the lecture room on the second deck to learn more about this fascinating world from lectures and slide shows that the American and European naturalists and historians onboard presented. There was also an extraordinary series of videos, Life in the Freezer, that the British had produced about Antarctica. Up on the bridge deck there was a library stuffed with books about natural history and the exploration of the area. When I could absorb no more information, there was a sauna back down on deck two that the crew kept super-heated, hotter than any sauna I had ever known. There the Russians introduced me to their custom of rubbing honey on their perspiring bodies, claiming that it was great for the skin. At about 54° S, we began to sense a drop in the air temperature, a sign that we were crossing the Antarctic Convergence. The naturalists explained that this is a region where deep currents from the north collide with frigid, denser polar ones, forcing the nutrient-laden waters to the surface. The variety and concentration of aquatic and air-borne wildlife confirmed that we had entered one of the richest feeding grounds in the world. Pelagic birds, some of which I had never seen in the northern hemisphere, were much in evidence here: pintados, prions, southern giant petrels and royal albatrosses with a wingspan of up to 12 feet. Three hundred sixty million birds of 20 to 30 species are estimated to migrate through or live fulltime in Antarctica, including six species of albatross and countless flocks of agile, swift-moving penguins. The penguins displayed remarkable teamwork as they darted, dove and leapt along the surface of the sea in pursuit of prey. We also spotted fin and humpbacked whales, seagoing fur seals and pods of orcas and bottlenose dolphins that had come to join the feeding frenzy. Paul Konrad, an editor from Wildbird magazine who was also a passenger on the Shuleykin, explained how the whales and dolphins came here to feed on the immense quantities of krill that swarmed invisibly through the water around us. The day before we were due to arrive at South Georgia Island, Olaf announced, "It's time to put our boats together!" But a 20-knot, near-freezing wind was whistling outside, so we tried assembling the first of our three folding kayaks inside the ship's bar. Alas, the big doubles proved much too long for that cozy sanctuary. We moved out onto the wind-swept deck, clutching the various pieces of our craft tightly to prevent them from being blown overboard. The ship had slowed down now, and big waves were rolling up and overtaking us from astern. A Russian crewman cautioned us always to keep a firm grip on a guardrail whenever we moved near the edge of the rolling, pitching deck. A glance at the seething sea racing past and no one required a second warning. The aluminum pieces of the boat frames were a struggle to fit together with our numb fingers, but by nightfall our three kayaks, as well as a unique collapsible white-water canoe of Norwegian design that photojournalist Larry Rice had brought along, were all lashed down securely on the aft deck, ready for launching. Later that night, I visited the bridge and found the officers on watch gathered around the ship's radio, following the weather reports closely. A big cyclonic depression had developed 250 miles to the northwest, but it appeared to be moving away from us. Small icebergs were scattered across the radar screen, and a sizable one loomed about six miles out at 2:00. At 12 knots and surging even faster in these following seas, even the Shuleykin with its hull strengthened for ice, could not risk a collision with something that size. Back down in the lecture room, Russian-born naturalist Peter Ourusoff began briefing us about the wildlife we would encounter around South Georgia Island. "Leopard seals are widely regarded as the most dangerous killers of wildlife in Antarctica, yet it's the big fur seal bulls in herds on the beaches that tend to be aggressive toward anything, including human beings, who wander into their territory." We would soon find out that he was not exaggerating. By dawn the next morning, the Shuleykin was at anchor in Grytviken Bay at 54° 17' S, 36° 30' W, offshore from an historical Norwegian whaling station long since shut down. Years of Antarctic storms had battered and crumbled the row of wooden structures ringing the little cove. Long before the seal hunters had come, the great British navigator Captain James Cook had anchored here when he discovered South Georgia Island in 1775. The sky was overcast, but the wind was light and the weather seemed to be holding steady. At a signal from Olaf, we pulled on our dry suits and launched our kayaks from a landing platform that the crew had lowered down to the water. We gathered into formation and began to paddle towards shore, where a jagged range of ice-clad mountains loomed above. A flock of swift macaroni penguins dove and leapt nearby, porpoising to get a better look at us. My paddling partner, Lou Gibbs, and I landed our kayak on a narrow strip of sandy beach near the crumbling remains of the whaling station, while the other paddlers explored the waterfront by kayak. We knew that the legendary Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton was buried here somewhere. In 1915, after his ship the Endurance became ice-bound in the Weddell Sea and was ground into splinters, he and his men subsisted for months on pack ice. When the pack ice finally broke up, they sailed their two lifeboats to uninhabited Elephant Island, where they found scant shelter from the Antarctic weather in a rocky cave. Shackleton then took a few of his men and sailed 800 miles in the most seaworthy of the two boats, through the storm- and iceberg-filled Southern Ocean. Their long sea journey climaxed in a surf landing on the blustery west coast of South Georgia Island. Even then, however, their trials were not over. Protected only by the tattered rags that remained of their clothing, they climbed across the glacier-covered mountains to reach the whaling station at Grytviken. Incredibly, not one of the Endurance crew perished during the eighteen months they were lost in Antarctica. When a journalist back in England asked Shackleton if he considered his expedition to be a success or a failure, he replied, "A successful expedition, sir, is one from which all hands return alive." Down the beach from where we landed, a herd of fur seals watched our every move. When I pulled a camera out of a waterproof case and took a few steps in their direction, a half-ton bull with inch-long canine teeth responded by charging straight toward me. I leapt over low hummocks of sedge grass, making a hasty and undignified retreat. A few minutes' walk away, we came upon Shackleton's grave. There, in the company of a few headstones from early Norwegian whalers, sat a stone marking the final resting place of this intrepid explorer. Engraved on the stone was a fragment of a poem by the English poet Robert Browning: "...that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life prize." From there we wandered through the ruins of the old whaling station. Approaching the edge of the grouping of buildings, we were surprised to find a sailboat tied up at an old whaler's dock. Tim and Pauline Carr greeted us warmly. They had sailed all the way to South Georgia Island from England on their small craft. The boat appeared impossibly small (only ten or twelve meters in length) to have made that long journey. They invited us to come aboard, and Pauline shared some harrowing stories of her own encounters with the fur seals, confessing that she had taken to carrying a big stick when she hiked around the island. Brandishing the stick usually discouraged an attack, but not always. "Last week I was walking down the beach, and this big brute lumbered up and grabbed the business end of my staff in his mouth. We played tug-of-war for quite a few moments, but he finally let go." She warned us about beaches farther along the coast where the really big herds of fur seal were entrenched. "Two sea kayakers came here a few months ago, after paddling back from Hound Bay. They tried to make camp there for the night, but the seals were so aggressive they had to get back in their kayaks and paddle on to another beach." We returned to our kayak and paddled northward along the rocky, corrugated shoreline that stretched northward beyond Grytviken cove. As we approached each beach, we could smell the distinctive, heady aroma of sea animals that feed on a diet of fish and krill. Almost every landing spot we found was packed with penguins and herds of fur seals. We paddled back to the Shuleykin before dark. The ship weighed anchor and moved farther down the coast during the night. For the next three days we explored the protected eastern side of the island, launching each morning and paddling the most interesting stretches of the rugged shoreline. Having unladen boats made it easy to land and launch on the steep, rocky beaches. After paddling all day in the biting cold, it was a relief to return to the haven of the Shuleykin each night. A hot sauna and a warm meal seemed preferable to remaining ashore in the midst of the territorial fur seals after dark. One morning when a moderate swell was running, Jonathan capsized in the icy water during an attempt to launch from the mother ship. After ducking back into his cabin for a dry pair of socks, he got back in his kayak and launched successfully. "That water was a bit cold," he admitted later. "But I'm glad it happened here, within easy reach of my dry cabin, and not in Greenland where Olaf and I camped out of our kayaks continuously for ten days." The next day we entered a large, sweeping inlet named St. Andrews Bay. A mile or so of broad beach swept around to rocky points at either side, bisected by a large, silt-colored stream that rushed from the mountains above, down to the sea.
Dozens of fur and elephant seals guarded all but a small section of the beach, but we aimed for that spot and were able to land without incident. Every stretch of beach not fully occupied by seals was covered by juvenile and adult king penguins. Both sexes of the stately kings sport vivid golden yellow markings on the sides of their heads, similar to the emperor penguins that live on the Antarctic mainland. They waddled about, uttering a medley of hoots, squeaks and trumpet sounds, and waving their flipper wings emphatically to resolve territorial disputes. Their nesting sites extended along the banks of the river as well, and up into the hills above. The naturalists onboard the Shuleykin had told us that this colony alone probably numbered over 200,000 birds. For the most part they seemed unperturbed by our presence, although we were careful not to blunder into their nesting areas. The skies above the penguin rookery were filled with circling, predatory skua gulls. As I watched, a pair of powerful gulls swooped down on a nest that a penguin had stepped away from for a moment and devoured its unguarded egg. We followed the river up into a steep-walled canyon in the mountains above, where hiking on the loose rock became increasingly difficult. We spotted a herd of wild reindeer, descendants of animals that whalers had brought from Norway nearly a century ago. They were the only land-based mammals we saw on South Georgia Island. They appeared wary and rather weatherworn, a small vestige of man's early presence on the island like the old whaling station at Grytviken. Our final day paddle along the coast of South Georgia Island led us deep into Drygalski Fjord, near the southernmost tip of the island. Paddling into the fjord was like entering into a flooded and frozen Yosemite Valley. Glacial ice, instead of waterfalls, flowed silently down from the towering cliffs above our heads. The mountains rose up steeply from the sea to form a continuous range of sharp-edged peaks that reminded me of the Alps. Even here in the fjord, each time we paddled around an exposed point, we felt a sudden increase in the energy of the ocean swells and wind that were wrapping around from the south. I shuddered when I contemplated what kayaking along the exposed, storm-battered western side of the island would be like. Olaf had told us about his friends, an American and two Australians, who came here last year and tried to paddle all the way around the island. They started up north by crossing over to Bird Island and then proceeded south along the west coast of the main island. Conditions quickly grew so intense that they had to land through big surf and rocks and portage back across the mountains to reach the relatively protected northeast coast again. They then paddled down to the southeast tip of the island, past where we were now, and tried to make it around Cape Disappointment. Once again, when they reached the fully exposed side of the island, breaking waves and howling winds forced them back. At a signal from Olaf, the group headed to a beach at the back of a small, rocky cove. A herd of fur seals was gathered around in a circle, watching two bulls who stood facing each other, lunging at each other and roaring. We assumed that since they were busy fighting among themselves they wouldn't pay any attention to us, so we landed. But when a young bull shuffled over and tried to nip Phil Rasori on the butt, we decided it was time to get back on the water and continue exploring the fjord. Reboarding the Shuleykin that evening, we headed west around Cape Disappointment. For the first time, we were headed straight into the full force of the Antarctic weather. While sailing in following seas earlier, the bow of the ship had risen thirty feet above the water; now it became engulfed in white water each time we collided with a big oncoming swell. None of my paddling companions voiced any regrets about the fact that our boats were lashed down on the aft deck again. I made my way back to the fantail and gazed at a jagged row of deep blue mountain peaks, slowly vanishing into the darkness behind us. I could see why the early explorers had described South Georgia Island as "the Himalayas of the Southern Ocean." Throughout the night I was awakened by grinding sounds and shuddering sensations echoing through the ship. The captain ordered our forward speed reduced, first to 10 knots, then even slower, as trained eyes constantly scanned the sea ahead. Most feared by Antarctic seamen were growlers, low, dense masses of ice that lie mostly beneath the surface of the sea and are nearly invisible. But apparently the ice pack wasn't yet thick enough to be a threat to the tough skin of our ship, and we plowed slowly onward. The next morning we awoke to a sea filled with millions of broken pieces of ice the size of pianos or smaller, interspersed with larger, glistening blue icebergs. Our trip leaders described this as merely "brash ice" conditions, and reassured us that it posed no threat to the thick steel hull of the Shuleykin. Olle Carlsson, a Swedish naturalist and one of that extraordinary breed of folks who feel compelled to return, year after year, to Antarctica, observed that the El Niño cycle had brought exceptionally heavy ice conditions to the Southern Ocean this summer season. "For centuries," he explained, "a river of ice has flowed away from Antarctica in all directions into the sea." Scientists estimate that more than 348 cubic miles of icebergs calve away from the continent each year, from a vast ice cap that is nearly 5000 meters thick in places and comprises 70 percent of the world's fresh water. The next afternoon, as we arrived at the South Orkney Islands, two dagger-like peaks rose up in a lowering sky. "I doubt they've ever been climbed," reflected Olaf, staring up at the ice-covered pinnacles. We gathered on the deck, hoping we would be able to launch our boats, but as we entered Gibbon Bay on Coronation Island, pack ice driven by strong westerly winds grated ominously against the armored flanks of the Shuleykin, ruling out any chance of paddling. We moved around to the lee side of the weatherworn point, but found the wind still howling, and the brash ice just as thick as before. Returning to Gibbon Bay, we spotted a jagged lead that had now opened in the ice, leading toward shore. Still, Jonathan Chester, the expedition's leader and a veteran of many long Antarctic journeys, remained uneasy. He was concerned that a shift in wind direction might slam the lead shut as quickly as it had opened, trapping any kayakers who had paddled away from the ship. We settled for a fast run toward shore in a Zodiac to get a closer look at the wildlife there. Twenty minutes later, we approached a powerfully built, ten-foot-long leopard seal resting on top of an ice floe. As I stared into his glistening black eyes, I recalled the riveting account I'd read of two of Shackleton's men being attacked by one of these animals during the months they were stranded on the drifting pack ice. A huge leopard seal had pursued one of the terrified men, first atop the ice and then by diving into the water and following the man's shadow as he ran across the ice. Then the leopard seal burst to the surface ahead of him and charged again. Fortunately, Frank Wild, Shackleton's second-in-command, arrived with a gun at that moment and shot the big carnivore as it turned to charge him. From the South Orkneys, we continued southwest across the Weddell Sea toward the mainland of Antarctica. About halfway across, when everyone had become accustomed again to the steady droning of the ship's engines and the rhythmic rolling in the open sea, a pod of orcas surfaced near the ship. The captain immediately ordered the engines reduced to idle, and passengers and crew rushed on deck. The sleek, powerful cetaceans repeatedly burst to the surface, the sound of their explosive breathing clearly audible. Their big dorsal fins knifed across the surface of the sea and their glistening black backs flexed as they swam. They were obviously aware of the ship looming above them, but, like most of the other wildlife we encountered in Antarctica, they seemed completely unconcerned by our presence. A half-hour later, the whales dove and vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. As we approached Hope Bay on the relatively sheltered eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, I sprinted up to the bridge to get the latest weather information. Like all of the sea kayakers on board, I was praying that the powerful winds that had been blowing since we left South Georgia Island would fall off. Still, conditions remained unsettled as we drew near the mainland. The wind blew steadily at about 20 knots with occasional higher gusts, and the surface of the sea was covered with whitecaps. Jonathan decided it was too dangerous to launch the kayaks. Once again, we resorted to a Zodiac ride to shore. When we saw the icy surf and howling wind that the crew had to negotiate to get us ashore, however, we once again appreciated Jonathan's judgment. We stepped ashore on the Antarctic continent, where a rookery of Adele penguins huddled on a small, windswept, rocky beach. The omnipresent predatory skuas circled watchfully overhead. Within moments of our arrival, the wind began gusting even more strongly and the surf crashing on the beach seemed to be steadily growing more powerful, so everyone made a dash for the Zodiac. We made it back out through the surf, but had to turn quickly to avoid a football field-sized iceberg that the wind was driving between us and the mother ship. If we had been in the folding kayaks, it would have been very tough, perhaps impossible, to get off that beach and punch through the six-foot shore break. That night we cleared the Antarctic Sound and headed north towards the South Shetland Islands. The weather seemed to be settling down at last. We arrived at Baily Head on the west coast of Deception Island, about 120 miles north of continental Antarctica, early in the morning of February 8. The ship's charts revealed a unique, ring-shaped island: a circle of volcanic hills and mountains surrounding a flooded caldera. Already in our dry suits, seven of us assembled on the fantail in the soft pastel light before dawn. There was a moderate swell running, and the weather to the northeast was clear. Olaf, Dana, Jonathan, Philip, Jan, canoeist Larry and I all launched our boats from the lowered platform. We turned north, toward a pair of dramatic sea stacks that our map designated as "Sewing Machine" (a massive, box-shaped rock) and "Needle" (a slender spire of stone that rose about fifty feet above the surface of the sea). Olaf remained alert for breaking waves or tricky currents as we approached the two edifices of gray, polished granite, but everyone passed through the gap between them without a problem. We continued along the coast, paddling through glassy seas, and rounded a final point of north-thrusting land. Shielded now from the prevailing western swells, we were able to kayak right up to the base of the palisade of brown and olive-colored cliffs that rose nearly straight up, to a height of about 300 feet above the water. Hundreds of sea birds, mostly gulls and cape petrels, circled in the sky above or peered down at us from their nests on the ledges high above. We came to a hundred-foot-wide opening in the cliffs, beyond which we could see the island's flooded inner caldera surrounded by snow-covered mountains. We soon discovered why the early sailors had named this Neptune's Bellows. The wind whistled through the narrow channel, most likely katabatic winds generated by icefields around the caldera. I remembered Olle's description of katabatic winds he had experienced around mountains in Antarctica, rising from 5 to 75 mph in a matter of minutes. Luckily, the winds remained moderate that day, and we slipped through the Bellows without incident. Ringing the caldera, buildings and machinery that had once digested cetaceans now lay crushed and scattered by the repeated onslaughts of mud and lava. Volcanic eruptions had rocked the island for years, forcing the British and Norwegians to abandon their whaling operations there long ago. We paddled deeper into the caldera, toward a beach where clouds of steam rose up from geo-thermal springs and hung suspended in the cold, still air. Approaching a cloud of steam on a nearby beach, we found a pool of heated water bubbling up invitingly. Without bothering to strip off my dry suit, I lay down, immersing myself up to my neck. After hours of kayaking, the warmth soaking into my tired muscles felt wonderful. It was a satisfying conclusion to kayaking at last among the wild, beautiful islands of Antarctica. Michael Powers is a photojournalist who specializes in paddling in wild and remote areas of the world. He and fellow Tsunami Ranger Eric Soares have completed a book, Extreme Sea Kayaking, published in the spring of 1999 by Ragged Mountain Press Sea Kayaking South Georgia http://www.seakayakermag.com/feb99/antarctica.htm
