Reverses in ice
Dec. 20th, 2007 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poletopoleShip's Position at 12:00:
That's not a typo — wind 34 knots, Beaufort 8, "Gale", this morning. Fine dry snow scours sideways moving too fast to settle on the ship, except in a few odd crevices.
And then around 14:00 the ship reaches the pack ice and our progress slowed. Again we are faced with that Antarctic improbability: multi-year ice pack, ridged, compressed, and complicated.
The average speed in the previous 24 hours wasn't as good as hoped — we met more ice in the night — so in an announcement before lunch, our projected arrival at Proclamation Island slipped from 14:00 today to this evening. This is greeted with serious faces all round. We have been in this pattern several times now on this voyage. Our "club's" conversation over the Mexican-themed lunch and a pitcher of strawberry margaritas is a search for something to break the curse, or at least to amuse ourselves, and I find the right thing: we'll commandeer a Zodiac.The Zodiacs are lashed to the bow deck, of course, and we won't put it in the water, but we'll have a DIY excursion. A quick whip-round and a full load of passengers is recruited, along with staff member Aaron, a qualified driver, to stand by the outboard motor, "steer", and make engine noises. As a finishing touch we ask Danielle (asst. expedition leader) to make sure Jonas (expedition leader) is on the bow around 15:15. Unfortunately we can't locate Sergei, who hoses our boots when we come back, to hose us off periodically to simulate Zodiac splashing.
At 15:00, staff member Saskia brings out Shackleton the stuffed penguin, who's now wearing a penguin-printed T-shirt and shorts and carring a little flag that says "Welcome to Antarctica" on it. We've all turned our tags and we're wearing life vests, backpacks, and full excursion kit, and we jump into the Zodiac (which Aaron has filled with the emergency paddles from all the Zodiacs) to sing "Row, row, row your boat" in a notably disorganized way, brandish paddles (also disorganized, despite the driver's efforts), and lament our lack of progress. In fact the ship has just come to a dead halt in the ice pack, and instead of going forward, it reverses. Jonas appears, appreciates the joke, and more mock paddling and noise and photo snapping follows as the ship grinds forward and backward. Half-a-dozen Adelie penguins on an ice flow 200 meters away eye the ship. Someone suggests that since the Zodiac isn't working, we head for the helicopters.
This is a fun group of people to be with, and the frustrations of the trip would be far less tolerable without them. I'm glad to have such good-humored traveling companions.
It's cold out, and we troop back in by 15:30. A helicopter does go up with the captain on it to examine the ice situation — the ship is having little success pushing through the interlocked piles of ice, as they don't fracture apart when rammed as sea ice in great plates does. No crack, no movement, no opening for the bow to work in. The helicopter returns, the nearly-expected-now announcement is made, and at 16:30 the ship reverses, to go back out of the heaviest ice and seek a channel or better passage. We're going east again.
I meet D. in the hall a little while later and he observes that we may not hit land until Mawson, which is beginning to seem very, very likely.
While I was taking the ship's position information, I had a chance to ask Jonas and Bob Headland about the lat-long information. It's given in degrees, minutes, and decimals of minutes; .4 minutes is about 800 meters. The resolution can be even finer if they go to simply decimal degrees; that allows 3 meters or finer resolution (the antenna itself), and can generate complaints from passengers whose GPS's give differing readings because they are not standing beside the antenna!
Bob tells me that a new navigational measuring system is being introduced. Instead of the 360-degree circle, it uses a 400-degree circle. A quarter circle is 100 degrees; 1/100 of a quarter circle (1/400 of a circle) is a "grade", and 1/100 of a grade (1/100,000 of a circle) is a "centigon". This seems gratuitously confusing, but isn't: a centigon is about the same as a kilometer, and so this system offers the possibility of unifying land and sea charts. British charts are already being printed with these units on them, and if you buy a compass in Scandinavia, Bob says, it will have 400 degrees on it.
- 64°40.0' S 51°45.4' E
- Course 143°; Speed 14.3 kts
- Air temperature 0°C; Wind 34 kts; Direction 100°
- Weather: Cloudy, windy; Visibility 7
- Ice Cover: 2/10
- Distance covered past 24 hours: 309.2 nautical miles
That's not a typo — wind 34 knots, Beaufort 8, "Gale", this morning. Fine dry snow scours sideways moving too fast to settle on the ship, except in a few odd crevices.
And then around 14:00 the ship reaches the pack ice and our progress slowed. Again we are faced with that Antarctic improbability: multi-year ice pack, ridged, compressed, and complicated.
The average speed in the previous 24 hours wasn't as good as hoped — we met more ice in the night — so in an announcement before lunch, our projected arrival at Proclamation Island slipped from 14:00 today to this evening. This is greeted with serious faces all round. We have been in this pattern several times now on this voyage. Our "club's" conversation over the Mexican-themed lunch and a pitcher of strawberry margaritas is a search for something to break the curse, or at least to amuse ourselves, and I find the right thing: we'll commandeer a Zodiac.The Zodiacs are lashed to the bow deck, of course, and we won't put it in the water, but we'll have a DIY excursion. A quick whip-round and a full load of passengers is recruited, along with staff member Aaron, a qualified driver, to stand by the outboard motor, "steer", and make engine noises. As a finishing touch we ask Danielle (asst. expedition leader) to make sure Jonas (expedition leader) is on the bow around 15:15. Unfortunately we can't locate Sergei, who hoses our boots when we come back, to hose us off periodically to simulate Zodiac splashing.
At 15:00, staff member Saskia brings out Shackleton the stuffed penguin, who's now wearing a penguin-printed T-shirt and shorts and carring a little flag that says "Welcome to Antarctica" on it. We've all turned our tags and we're wearing life vests, backpacks, and full excursion kit, and we jump into the Zodiac (which Aaron has filled with the emergency paddles from all the Zodiacs) to sing "Row, row, row your boat" in a notably disorganized way, brandish paddles (also disorganized, despite the driver's efforts), and lament our lack of progress. In fact the ship has just come to a dead halt in the ice pack, and instead of going forward, it reverses. Jonas appears, appreciates the joke, and more mock paddling and noise and photo snapping follows as the ship grinds forward and backward. Half-a-dozen Adelie penguins on an ice flow 200 meters away eye the ship. Someone suggests that since the Zodiac isn't working, we head for the helicopters.
This is a fun group of people to be with, and the frustrations of the trip would be far less tolerable without them. I'm glad to have such good-humored traveling companions.
It's cold out, and we troop back in by 15:30. A helicopter does go up with the captain on it to examine the ice situation — the ship is having little success pushing through the interlocked piles of ice, as they don't fracture apart when rammed as sea ice in great plates does. No crack, no movement, no opening for the bow to work in. The helicopter returns, the nearly-expected-now announcement is made, and at 16:30 the ship reverses, to go back out of the heaviest ice and seek a channel or better passage. We're going east again.
I meet D. in the hall a little while later and he observes that we may not hit land until Mawson, which is beginning to seem very, very likely.
While I was taking the ship's position information, I had a chance to ask Jonas and Bob Headland about the lat-long information. It's given in degrees, minutes, and decimals of minutes; .4 minutes is about 800 meters. The resolution can be even finer if they go to simply decimal degrees; that allows 3 meters or finer resolution (the antenna itself), and can generate complaints from passengers whose GPS's give differing readings because they are not standing beside the antenna!
Bob tells me that a new navigational measuring system is being introduced. Instead of the 360-degree circle, it uses a 400-degree circle. A quarter circle is 100 degrees; 1/100 of a quarter circle (1/400 of a circle) is a "grade", and 1/100 of a grade (1/100,000 of a circle) is a "centigon". This seems gratuitously confusing, but isn't: a centigon is about the same as a kilometer, and so this system offers the possibility of unifying land and sea charts. British charts are already being printed with these units on them, and if you buy a compass in Scandinavia, Bob says, it will have 400 degrees on it.
