850 miles from the South Pole
In February 2003 we traveled from New Zealand to the Ross Sea area of the Antarctic aboard the Russian polar research vessel, Akademik Shokalskiy. Our destination was the winter huts of Shackleton and Scott, and several other early Antarctic explorers. Scott and Shackleton were bitter rivals. It was from his “hut” on Ross Island that Shackleton started his attempt in 1909 to be the first to reach the South Pole, but had to turn back less than a hundred miles from his destination. If he had not done so he would not have lived to tell about it. Several years later, Scott left from his hut in 1911 and reached the Pole only to find that Amundsen of Norway had beaten him to the Pole by just three weeks. Scott and his team perished on the return trip to Ross Island.
Each year about fourteen thousand people visit the Antarctic Peninsula from South America, but only a few hundred visit Ross Island and the winter huts of the early Antarctic explorers. There are good reasons. The northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula is only about 750 miles from South America. Ross Island and McMurdo Sound are 2,200 miles from New Zealand, and only 850 statute miles from the Pole. Weather and ice conditions are also more severe that much further south. This means there are only two months a year in which the trip could possibly be made to Ross Island because of the colder temperatures and sea ice. Even during this two-month period it is far from certain that a ship can get through the ice, as I describe vividly below.
The Akademik Shokalskiy is one of only two ships that regularly attempts to make this trip each year. The ship is chartered by a small family-owned company, Heritage Expeditions, located in Christchurch, New Zealand and they have been making this trip for ten years. It carries only forty-five tourists. The only way a private citizen can get to that part of the world is by ship-and only in January and February, when it is summer in the Antarctic. This limits the number of tourists to a very few. In fact, in January, as related in the diary below, the Akademik Shokalskiy could not get further south than 74 degrees South latitude because of pack ice, several hundred miles short of Ross Island and the Shackleton and Scott huts.
We were more lucky in February. We got to both of these huts, but the ice stopped us from visiting the huts of several other explorers at Cape Adare and Possession Islands. We were also scheduled to visit the United States Research Station at McMurdo on the southern tip of Ross Island but could not get the last seven kilometers into McMurdo Sound, again because of ice. Two United States Coast Guard icebreakers were unable to keep the shipping lane open into McMurdo. The sea ice froze almost as quickly as it was opened. We stopped near an oil tanker that was waiting to get into McMurdo to unload desperately needed fuel. The tanker never made it, and eventually they had to lay portable oil lines five miles over the ice in order to off-load the oil. The pack ice was severe, and winter was upon us in mid-February.
Later we had our own scare when the Akademik Shokalskiy became trapped in the pack ice for almost five hours.
This was a very rigorous trip. As described in my diary entries that follow, we had to go through some of the most turbulent seas in the world, with the ship rolling first thirty degrees to the right, then immediately thirty degrees to the left, and then back again, all in less than eight seconds. The trip to Cape Adare, the northernmost point of that part of Antarctica, took seven days from New Zealand, and then two more from there south to Ross Island. This was summer. We wonder what it must be like in winter.
I paid a heavy price for the violence of the Southern Ocean. After returning home, I saw the doctor about my shoulders, the left one being the worst. In May, I had to have shoulder surgery to reattach several tendons that were torn off my rotator cuff. While I have long had problems with my shoulders, there can be little doubt that the violence of this trip was the final straw.