by Jon Tucker
Adapted from Snow Petrel for The Marine Quarterly, Autumn 2016
Fifteen hundred miles south of Tasmania, nestled into the Antarctic promontory of Cape Denison, is a tiny boat harbour less than two fathoms deep and half a cable wide. For roughly four weeks after each summer solstice, the fast-ice breaks out, leaving sufficient room for a single yacht, trussed on every quarter with shorelines stropped to boulders. It is a unique anchorage in a coastline dominated by thousands of miles of giant ice-cliffs.
The Antarctic Pilot reveals some rather startling data on this extremely isolated location. For 284 days of the year the Cape is lashed with persistent winds of force 9 or greater. Mawson’s Australian scientific team regularly recorded wind gusts over 200 mph during their incarceration here in 1912. What they hadn’t known, when they established their small base here shortly after the summer solstice, was that behind their Baltic pine hut was a natural channel which funnelled the katabatic down-flow of freezing air from the inland icecap onto this stretch of coastline. It wasn’t obvious when they arrived with a January high pressure system just offshore holding it at bay like a big dam. But when the Lows tracked past like giant vacuum cleaners, the pent-up sub-zero air mass would be sucked past their hut at unbelievable velocities.
No other location on the planet has recorded such an intense and prolonged wind-battering. The Pilot shows that the only months of significant reprieve from incessant katabatics are December and January, when summer anticyclones reduce the chance of being hammered to one day in two.
This was the little meteorological lottery which my son Ben planned to poke his nose into, 93 years later. He had recruited his youngest brother Matt as crew, and – on sufferance – allowed me to tag along as cabin-boy on my promise of good behaviour. Over the previous two decades about half a dozen well-funded large expedition yachts had attempted to reach Cape Denison – not all successfully. Ben’s home-built steel Roberts 34 sloop Snow Petrel was only a fraction of their displacement, with a shoestring budget which could not even allow for a second-hand radar.
43ºS Departure (Southern Tasmania, Jan 4, 2006): I’m amazed how calm and happy Barbara appears. She laughs and jokes with the rest of them, and to an onlooker she would seem to be waving us off for an afternoon fishing trip, not a voyage from which we might never return. We gather the lines and reverse out. Ben is determined to be under full sail as swiftly as possible. He has always hated engines, even as a small child.
He and I unshackle the anchor from its chain and bring it below to lash it among the foc’sle gear. We won’t be needing it for a while now, and the weight is better low down and further aft. Not a moment too soon, with the bow beginning to gently lift and plunge as we meet the Southern Ocean swells. I glance at the GPS, already programmed to the waypoint of Cape Denison. It reads 1442 nautical miles nearly due south.
Roaring Forties, Day 2
Sched time. Our first radio contact since we’ve left land. Ben bought his HF marine set second hand for $100 not long before we left, and mounted it deep inside his quarter-berth – the driest place in the boat, he had claimed. This evening I’ve decided to name it the ‘radio cave’, and despite our queasiness Matt and I are hovering around the companionway to listen to the comms.
For so many years I’ve been the one doing radio coms, and it’s a humbling experience for me to be a mere cabin-boy listening to my son as skipper on that microphone. A yacht’s radio voice is her mouthpiece. Snow Petrel tonight has become Ben himself to any ears out there.
Tonight on four megs, Mike Harris, our live-aboard friend booms in. He’s found some online GRIB files, predicting wind-speed and direction for up to a week ahead. The good news is that there’s nothing sinister out there for us for a while, just two days of twenty to thirty knot westerlies.
He signs off. With barely a hesitation, Barbara’s voice fills the cabin. I’m stunned. When we left yesterday, the radio on our ketch New Zealand Maid didn’t seem to be working at all, and there was no time to fix it. She’s spent all day stripping down all the vital wiring and remounting the aerial connections. Ben asks her to stand by and wriggles out of the cave so that I can slide in on my sensitive stomach for a quick chat.
Barbara has overheard Ben hinting to Mike that his crew’s a bit under the weather and she quizzes me in an embarrassingly loud voice. It’s hard to keep secrets on the airwaves and you can’t whisper, so I come clean and reassure her that it’s a mere touch of queasiness, nothing too serious.
There are other ears out there too. My humiliation is complete. I slink off to my bunk for the remaining two hours of my watch off. Here the motion is cradle-like. Lying prone like this my stomach relaxes. On the deck directly above me I can hear the tramp of Ben’s feet and the zip of his harness clip on the safety line as he does his rounds to the foredeck. It’s a strange feeling to have reversed roles with my own son. At this instant I’m the weak one and he’s demonstrating the invincibility that a child expects in a parent. I think back to his birth, to that tiny six pound wrinkled specimen of humanity, helpless and so full of potential.
I hear him come below for Matt. There are the sounds of feet and winches, and I know they must be slabbing in a third reef. Then the rustle of wet weather gear being removed, and later the sound of Matt retching in his solitude.
KaBOOM! What a way to wake up. I feel Snow Petrel being pile-driven sideways for at least twenty metres. I stick my head up in the dome of the closed hatch to see Matt slouched safely in the shelter of the dodger. The beam seas are whitecapped and fairly steep but not high enough to be alarming. Getting the odd slammer like that is just the one in a hundred chance of being in the exact spot where a wave decides to break. It’s like being inside a nine ton steel bodyboard sideways-on to the surf.
It’s nearly my watch anyway, so I get my gear on. We are now further south than I’ve ever sailed before.
Furious Fifties – Day 5
I’ve come off my midday watch and am decorating the whiteboard. ‘WELCOME TO THE FURIOUS FIFTIES’ reads the big one, footnoted ‘proceed with caution’. A smaller one reads ‘THE ROARING FORTIES FAREWELLS YOU – thank you for sailing carefully.’ With three seconds of latitude to go I add a couple more ‘Beware strong winds’ and ‘Whales crossing’.
Three, two, one – whoopee. Fifty South! We celebrate with an early happy hour (a can of beer – shared between the three of us, to Matt’s disgust – with a plate of crackers and gherkins).
Day 6 1415 hrs
The barometer is dropping like a stone – from 1010 to 991 since midnight. Ben managed to splice up a warp this morning for the drogue. Matt’s been cooking up a huge casserole while it’s not too rough, though Snow Petrel is already starting to corkscrew. Ben’s most recent fax shows the Low centre almost right on top of us. We dumped the main completely on my midday watch and are now broad reaching under storm stays’l with only a scrap of genoa left unrolled. It’s 45 knots out there already.
I’m resting in my sleeping bag for now, while Matt opens up the pressure cooker to check if it’s ready. It’s a huge pot of stew, enough for three days of bad weather – a lesson he’s learned from his mum – and a delicious aroma fills the cabin. He calls Ben down to grab a feed while the going’s good. Then, suddenly, our world comes unstuck.
I’m enveloped in a roar of noise, and gravity has strangely reversed. From my vantage point, pinned between the locker doors and the deck-head, I’m being squirted with water like a fire hydrant. I see Ben jammed in the open companionway door, one leg in and one still out. He is caught in a torrent of rushing water, his body stemming the flow of what otherwise would be an open sluice-gate. Matt is pinned against the galley cabin-side at the mercy of a still hot stove-top and a deluge of white water.
The sensation lasts long enough to register the sense of motion. We are moving sideways, very quickly. In fact Snow Petrel has become like a giant water-scoop, mast underwater, keel out, being driven sideways at twenty odd knots for fifty or sixty metres. Her deck is like the blade of a great bulldozer pushing water. Small wonder the supposedly watertight skylight is gushing all over me.
2130 hrs: We’re pretty much cleaned up now and Matt managed to salvage enough stew from the back of the food lockers for a reasonable feed. The bilges are dry again and the electrics have survived. We’re going to have to live with wet mattresses and sleeping bags for a while, but things could be a lot worse.
It’s shrieking out there, between 50 and 60 knots maybe. The sea is a mass of foam with long streaks between each crest. We’re doing watches mostly inside with our heads in the hatch dome, hanging on tight. But the motion has become lazier now that the drogue is out. It’s a Seabrake plastic cone back there, a hundred metres behind us, weighed down with fathoms of chain. In flippant terms, I guess, that broach was nature’s way of telling us to slow down and alter course. To broach is to be overpowered by a quartering sea so that the rudder can no longer keep a vessel on her course. In an instant she will slew around in a giant foaming skid until she is side-on to a breaking wave. The rest is up to the gods.
The fax tonight looked as if we’re in the middle of a bullseye of isobar lines, so close together that they seem almost solid. But the barometer seems to have bottomed out. From now on things should steadily get better.
55º S, Day 7
Snow Petrel loved us when we hauled in the drogue this morning . She positively shook herself and kicked up her heels at the sense of freedom. She was labouring like a filly hauling a dray all night. But it was for her own good – and ours of course.
It’s a special day today and even the sun is out to help us celebrate. There’s a steady 17 knot nor’westerly and we’re rollicking along under full sail. But it’s markedly colder than yesterday. There are a lot more birds around, clouds of petrels and shearwaters, and some unusual cumulus on the horizon. Ben is convinced that we’ve crossed the convergence – that distinct transition line between cold Antarctic waters and the merely cool waters further north. To prove it he runs the thermometer under the galley seawater tap. It reads only five degrees compared with eight yesterday.
That gives us two reasons for a celebration, or three if you count the first fine day of the trip. We’ve decided to set the half way point at 711 nautical miles to Cape Denison. That’s half of the 1422 miles we had to go when we left Tasmania. We’re expecting to get there at around 1400 hrs and Matt already has a chocolate cake in the oven. How he still manages to cook in bare feet I don’t know. It’s my watch so I’m popping up and down like a yoyo, accidentally standing on his bare toes while I’m licking the cake bowl. His slightly grumpy response is ludicrously self-controlled : ‘I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t stand on my foot Dad’. (I’ll swear we have the politest cook in the Southern Ocean.)
The cake comes out all heaped up in a corner of the cake dish like a sloping wave. The oven must have been unbalanced in its gimbals. The cake is a masterpiece though. It has become a landscape sloping down to the sea and iced in white. True to the chart of Cape Denison, it has a boat harbour of blue scalloped out of it, with a red jellybean boat securely anchored. On the shoreline is a convincing chocolate Mawson’s Hut, and the whole landscape is littered with little black and white jellybean penguins. ‘Cake Denison’, he proclaims triumphantly, and we bargain over which parts of the landscape to eat first.
As this is a really special occasion we share two beer cans between us to wash it down. The only thing to mar the occasion is the speed with which the barometer is dropping. Despite our banter, we are very aware that we are now effectively out of reach of rescue and we have to be self-sufficient.
Screaming Sixties – Day 11
I’ve re-decorated the whiteboard again. ‘WELCOME TO THE SCREAMING SIXTIES – EXTREME CAUTION NEEDED.’ Then – ‘beware ice’, ‘slippery when wet’, ‘poor visibility’. I’m leaving ‘whales crossing’ on the board too.
It’s a weird twilit night. There’s simply no horizon and everything is a bland grey. The wind has nearly dropped and the sea’s going glassy. The compass is still there in the hatchway, its little red light glowing, but now we’re so close to the magnetic pole, the card is jammed on South.
I fire up the engine and try steering by the GPS but it’s no good. Without any reference point, not even a star, the GPS track shows that I’m curving away to starboard, overcorrecting to port, and achieving little but a succession of letter S’s. Maybe the fluxgate compass in the electric tiller pilot will still work? Ha! No show! We’ve just done a full figure-eight. Time to give up. I kill the engine, roll up the genoa and sheet the main in hard. Nothing to do but get my head-torch and read a book. Sooner or later we’ll get some wind.
To liven things up I play a trick on Ben before I drag him out of his cold wet bunk for his watch. Sneaking down, I twist his left seaboot so that it faces backwards inside his wet weather gear. I try to suppress my laughter as I watch him sleepily trying to insert his toe into his heel space, hidden in the folds of his trousers. Finally he decides that he must be putting on the whole trouser-boot package back to front, so he reverses the lot and tries to climb in the wrong way round. Of course this time the other boot is wrong. Seeing me laughing, he cottons on to the joke and spends the next five minutes smugly setting up Matt’s gear for an even more elaborate twist-up.
Icebergs – Day 13
We pass our first iceberg during Ben’s watch, an interestingly sculpted castle with a turret at each end. Down to leeward is another, a tabular one probably a mile long, relatively boring in its rectangularity. Matt wants us to sail close to it but Ben is spooked by its brash field, so we pose for some shots before Matt and I crawl back into our bunks. I’m reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and somehow it seems appropriate.
Pack Ice – Day 14
The horizon ahead is a low wall of white and gold. The sun hangs low in the southwest, emitting a golden light. To the north-east a nearly full moon glows in a pale blue sky. Ben is asleep and I delay calling him up until I’m sure the broken horizon is not a mere trick of light. Twenty minutes later there’s no doubt left. We’re motoring on a flat calm sea towards a seemingly impenetrable barrier, a jumble of white and golden shapes, angular and random.
Ben emerges from his bunk, suddenly awake and focused as he scans the approaching ice edge with binoculars, searching for an opening to lead us in. Hearing our excited talk, Matt surfaces too, camera in hand – as always – and stifling a yawn. The photographer in him registers the colours, the sheer beauty of this setting. I marvel at how two young men from the same gene pool can focus on such different aspects when placed in an identical situation: Ben, the navigator/skipper, ever the practical one, and Matt, the artist – such unique and distinct individuals.
The visible horizon from Snow Petrel’s cockpit, height of eye two metres, is only about three miles, and at five knots it doesn’t take long to close the pack edge. There is barely time to break out some celebratory chocolate. Ben has donned gloves, hat and harness already and is preparing to run up the ratlines to scan ahead for leads. It’s going to be a long and memorable night, even if it is one of perpetual light. We have reached 65º 43’S and are 77 miles from the ice cliffs of Antarctica.
As the sun’s lower limb slowly angles to dip below the south-western horizon we reach the pack. With no radiant warmth now, the air has a bite which numbs the lips and we find ourselves struggling to talk coherently. From aloft, Ben has identified a passage in. Standing with the tiller between my legs I steer us in.
We are motoring through what feels like a typical large river mouth, about a hundred metres wide and flanked by lumpy white stopbanks. We even have a few spectators waving – miniature tuxedo clad figures staring at us from their icy viewpoints and flapping in bewilderment.
From his perch far above me, Ben is scanning the distant expanse of white. Steering as I am with the tiller between my thighs, I can cradle my warm mug between both hands and absorb the heat. Aloft, Ben has no such luxury and has resorted to the little gel heat packs we purchased a lifetime ago in Hobart.
Ben is gesticulating excitedly and I follow his gaze. A pair of white winged shapes is sweeping effortlessly astern of us, much more swiftly than the seabirds over the southern ocean rollers. Their agility and energy is breathtaking and briefly they slide across the face of the moon.
‘Snow Petrels,’ shouts Ben.
Meanwhile we’re fast approaching a solid line of east-west ice. When Ben signals for me to turn to port I forget my lowly place as cabin-boy, and query his call. Mistake! Ben leaves no doubt who’s captain of this ship. His air of authority, earned during years of responsibility on big ship bridge-decks, puts me firmly in my place.
Two twilit hours later we’re still tracking eastward through an ice channel which stretches as far as the eye can see to the east. Embedded in the pack are several large icebergs which give the surreal terrain a false sense of permanence. Like isolated hills arising from a blue-white plain, they are useful steering references as we motor slowly along this wide lead. It is not a totally open channel, but the small isolated bergy bits scattered across our path are easy to avoid.
Ben is back in the cockpit now and I take the opportunity to climb the spreaders and survey the pack to our south. It is completely different from my earlier expectations. Rather than a solid mass of flat ice, it is a mixture of old and new sea ice, laid out in distinct bands. It is as if Antarctica, like Saturn, is surrounded by rings. The belt beside us is just one of a number of similar east-west belts cutting us off from our destination. To find an opening through the first wall would allow us only fifty or so metres to the next, and so on for as far as the limited southern horizon would reveal.
The southern sky is a radiant pink. Dusk and dawn have fused into a single transitional light-filled phase, and only Venus is visible, glowing in a pale blue sky.
Back on deck, I can see that Ben is worried. A light northerly has picked up and the whole field is beginning to move. At this stage, everything is moving in synch, and our channel is not squeezing up, but we wonder if our entry lead is closing behind us. It is a relief when Ben calls off our eastward search, and we begin to backtrack, noting how much our inbound GPS track has already been displaced sidewards.
Ben’s face is a picture of exultation mixed with concern. The burden of responsibility is clearly sitting very heavily on his shoulders. He points out the differences between multi-year ice and sea ice, between heavy pack and three-tenths It has become clear to all three of us that he is the ice-master.
Someone needs to go below for an off-watch. Reluctantly I volunteer. This is the experience of a lifetime and I’m lapping it up, but we are going to have to discipline ourselves over the coming hours. The consequences of fatigue are too dire, and it is now that the value of having three rather than two to share helming duties is most apparent.
Four hours later, alone in the cockpit with the engine barely above idle, I enjoy the unimaginable colours of the icescape around me. Some of the decaying bergy bits glow turquoise and emerald, and others are layered in browns and yellows. Two months ago the sea here was fast-ice with Emperor Penguins trudging over it. The flatter slabs now are the remnants of the winter’s fast-ice, while the crazy angular stuff is probably multi-year slabs which have been fused together during successive winters. The larger chunks are likely to be fragments of ancient icebergs, calved off the cliff-like walls and sculpted by waves, wind and sun. The babies of the pack are the bits of brash, particles ranging in size from pots and pans to kitchen tables. We need to keep reminding ourselves that only ten percent of anything floating here is visible. The invisible ninety percent lurking beneath the surface will contain a mass equivalent to a sizable chunk of rock.
After two hours moving steadily southwards it becomes clear Snow Petrel is running out of clear water. It’s not that this wide lead is narrowing but rather that it’s becoming too choked with random chunks of loose pack for us to continue safely. In Ben’s terms, I guess we are motoring into four-tenths pack. My real fear is the submerged shelves which lurk around the edges of the larger heavily decayed bergs.
I take her out of gear and wait for us to lose way. Ben, not surprisingly, shows up almost immediately, looking rather the worse for wear. He takes in the situation immediately and waits for me to run aloft. He doesn’t seem surprised with my disappointing conclusion that there’s no open sea in sight. There is no other option than to backtrack once more, this time to the north, and he disappears below again to grab a little more sleep while the going is safe.
1230 hrs Over the past ten hours of feeling our way, we’ve made good only ten miles towards Antarctica but at least the ice has killed any seas. The pack has a different feel from last night. Gone are Saturn’s rings. In their place is a confusing labyrinth of leads. We’re under full sail now, and surprisingly I’m enjoying the challenge. At our mere three or four knots of boat speed, and without any sea running, the danger seems diminished. Ben is spending a lot of time aloft and has a strong hunch that there is open water not too far to the south. From his vantage point, he’s cheating the maze and directs me left and right into ever-narrowing fresh leads while Matt is busy filming.
I’m finding it a strain to continue under sail. Ben directs me into a tiny four metre wide gulch and I let go all sheets to reduce our way. As we ghost through the gap, I watch the pale green of a shallow shelf directly beneath our starboard side. My inability to control our speed is becoming a strain. Sails are doused and the intrusive noise of our engine spoils the solitude. No-one complains.
According to Ben’s judgement we are now negotiating five-tenths ice surrounded with nine-tenths pack. Its saving grace is its layout and the fact that there is unmistakably open sea only two hundred metres to our south. The ice here is big multi-year stuff. At deck level we can’t see over it. Ben’s strategy is to zigzag our way through the tiny leads, and if necessary nudge up to an obstacle and use the engine to shove it laboriously out of our way. Thankfully we don’t need that option.
At five o’clock in the afternoon we make an abrupt exit from a high wall of ice into blue open sea. Antarctica is now a mere thirty miles away across open water. But where? At this distance, the coast should be visible. We scan the horizon. Below the distant line of light grey cloud is nothing but a horizon of blue sea.
Then the revelation hits me. I can’t believe how easily our eyes have deceived us. Cloud line – phooee! We’re looking at the grey-white skyline of the great continent itself and it’s probably been visible all day.
Cape Denison – Day 16
This is a landfall like I’ve never experienced before. The cliff-tops, which I’m programmed to expect as green, are simply white – merging into a featureless smear of grey where the skyline meets the sky, devoid of any mountain range or even a single angle.
We heave-to behind a large iceberg for a while to get the big anchor on deck and inflate the tinker. Now as the GPS counts us down the last few miles, we’re motoring easily in a moderate offshore breeze. The sun has been skulking behind the skyline for a couple of hours, but it’s still daylight at 0100 hrs. We’re just inside the Antarctic circle now and (drat) we missed a celebration. I’m chilled to the bone. There’s a relentless bite to that breeze. Matt yells something and points. His eyes must be sharper than we thought. There on the grey-black promontory ahead is a cross, silhouetted starkly against the rose-tinted sky. We’ve read about the tragedy of Mawson’s expedition, and the huge cross that he had erected to ease the pain of his comrades’ deaths. And there it stands, over ninety years later, a poignant reminder of the historic interface between nature’s impartiality and human endurance.
With the chart on hand we motor under Cape Denison, turn right at the one-third point across the entrance to Boat Harbour, and creep slowly into the inlet towards Mawson’s Hut. The sounder rises to less than three metres, then levels off.
Even above the clatter of Snow Petrel’s diesel we can hear an awful din, an unfamiliar staccato braying. But we are too preoccupied to fully register the sheer numbers of Adele penguins clustered among the grey and white landscape.
I’m on the foredeck struggling with the lashings on the giant fisherman anchor. My gloved fingers refuse to work. The delicate operation of untying even a simple slipknot is beyond my power. In desperation I resort to a knife. Snow Petrel’s bow is beginning to sheer away towards the eastern rocks as the chain rattles out. Twenty, thirty, forty metres. I throw a couple of turns on the bollard to let her pull up, then turn to Ben for his intentions. Too much chain and we could sheer from side to side, crunching rocks in the process. ‘Let go the lot!’ His command is so decisive I don’t even query it. Sixty metres is a lot of chain. We’ll need every metre of it in here when the next hundred knot katabatic hits us.
The tinker looks like a toffee apple when we launch it, glazed in a smooth layer of ice, and the outboard takes ages to start, despite Ben’s precaution of checking that it was working earlier in the day.
Ben and Matt both want to set foot on land straight away which is fine by me. It’s like a freezer out there and I’m happy to wait till later when the sun’s well up. So my function is to keep the kettle and thermos full of hot water, and to feed them rope out of this giant coil as they search the shore for suitable fastening points. The advantage of being in charge of hot water is that I get to mind the hotwater bottles while the boys are playing around ashore. I’ve found some good spots to mind them too. Two stuffed inside my jacket and another wrapped in a towel where I can put my hands in very regularly to check it’s still warm.
Four hours later we are secure, all sitting on the settees. Hot chocolate for everyone and a hot-water bottle each while we talk – buzzing, a babble of talk. We’ve actually done it, made it to Antarctica. It somehow doesn’t seem real. I break out the rum. There are no watches to keep now. And we talk. Talk. Talk. It all pours out, two months’ worth of hopes and fears. So much that could have gone wrong. Storms, dismasting, ice-collisions, engine or transmission failure, injury…. Yet here we are, our little team, unscathed and in good spirits.
The rum loosens our tongues and the banter begins. I pour a second glass all round then squirrel the bottle away for another occasion. We are a team, a bunch of good mates.
Then sleep, glorious glorious sleep.
Snow Petrel is available online as an eBook or paperback on this link.