by Chris Turney
With a deep breath, we entered the murky world of international shipping. We contacted anyone who might have a vessel: companies in the U.K., South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. I lost count of the number of calls I made to individuals who were representing themselves or companies, often with few or no credentials for being able to offer access to a ship. It’s a strange business. During some of the conversations I felt like I was at real risk of signing up to a Nigerian internet scam. So you want a deposit of $100,000, and you can get us a ship for a bargain price? Right . . .
It was a steep learning curve. The class of vessels, their size, capacity, range, and add-ons were daily questions as Chris and I scoured the world’s shipping market. The big stumbling block was a shortage of vessels in the Southern Hemisphere that were both suitable and affordable. Several ships were for sale, but purchasing would have come with horrifying operating costs and the formidable task of finding a suitable captain and crew. Our best option was to hire a vessel with a crew. A small Christchurch-based operator called Heritage Expeditions found the only vessel that seemed to be available: the Russian-registered , or, in English, the MV Akademik Shokalskiy.
The Shokalskiy was just what we needed. Berthed in the north Pacific port of Vladivostok, the 233-foot-long ice-strengthened vessel had been built in 1982, one of a fleet of Soviet ships used to spy on the West in the Arctic. Today, she is operated by the Far Eastern Hydrometeorological Research Institute for friendlier pursuits. In 1998, she was converted to a research and cruise ship, with laboratory space and a lecture room, and capable of carrying fifty-four passengers in relative comfort, with seventeen crew. The Shokalskiy had been laid up for the last two seasons, but Heritage assured us she could be brought up to operational standard in no time. With decades of sea-ice experience on board and time spent in Commonwealth Bay before the arrival of B09B, the Shokalskiy offered all we wanted. But she didn’t come cheap. Including the cost of bringing her down from the north Pacific, the Shokalskiy came in at US$31,000 a day. It was that or nothing.
CHAPTER THREE
The Furious Fifties
It’s 24 November 2013, and I’m driving out from Invercargill along a quiet, windswept road to the port of Bluff. I’m excited. After months of preparations I’m about to see the vessel that will take us to the Antarctic in three days’ time.
At last. A moment to myself.
The rolling green fields hurtle by. I wind down the window and breathe in the damp fresh air. It’s been a hectic year.
Alone with my thoughts, I reflect on all that’s happened. The dizzying highs and lows of organising an expedition south; research-planning meetings with the teams in New Zealand and Australia; securing the all-important scientific kit and other essential gear; the chasing of permissions; the never-ending stream of naysayers. We’ve achieved so much, but what has yet to happen hangs heavy on my mind. Uncertainty can be a terribly debilitating thing. I shake my head and cast aside the lingering doubts. We’re off in a few days. There’s not much else that can be done. There comes a point when you have to let go and trust in the team and all your hard work.
Passing the derelict, weather-beaten Victorian warehouses of Bluff, I drive on to the causeway that leads to the deep-water port. After a brief check of my credentials, I’m waved past security. I can see the Shokalskiy’s masts reaching above the dockside buildings. I turn the corner and catch my first glimpse of our ship, its distinctive blue hull and white-topped decks proud among the warehouses and cranes of the port. I’ve seen lots of photos of the Shokalskiy beating a path through Antarctic sea ice. Now here she is, waiting to take our expedition south.
The harborside is bustling with activity. The Heritage guys are frantically getting supplies on board before we officially take over the vessel tomorrow. Three large black inflatable Zodiac boats are being hoisted off the dockside by the ship’s rear yellow deck crane and tied down among the lashed fuel drums and crates; they’re going to be crucial for getting the team to and from the shore.
I park, and another four-wheel drive filled with gear pulls up beside me. Chris steps out.
“Doesn’t she look fantastic?” Chris is grinning from ear to ear.
I nod. I’ve sometimes wondered whether we’d get this far, but seeing the Shokalskiy here makes it all worthwhile.
Close up, I glimpse parts of the bow peeling, the side panels pitted with age. The Shokalskiy has been painted, patched up and painted again in her thirty years, yet I can’t help but look fondly on her.
She’s all ours.
Our Heritage contact Aaron Russ breaks off from the work on the dockside and waves a greeting. Walking over, he introduces the shoulder-high figure accompanying him as Captain Igor, a smiling man of fifty-plus years who shakes our hands in welcome.
“Nice to meet you,” Igor says in his heavily accented English. “Please, settle in. I have paperwork, but be free to look round Shokalskiy.” With an apologetic shrug, he leaves to sort out the mountain of forms required for our departure as Aaron offers to take us round the ship.
Walking up the gangway, it all seems strangely familiar. Chris and I have been studying the ship’s plans for months, working out where best to put team members, stores, field gear and laboratory equipment. I know every room before Aaron opens its door. There’s one thing that catches me off guard, though: the Russian signs and posters that cover the walls, illustrated with short, abruptly worded English translations.
Silly, really. I should have expected it.
I dump my gear in the forward port-side cabin, just one floor below the ship’s bridge on what is known as the boat deck. I’m right next door to the captain’s room. With a bed in the corner and a small but functional shower-cum-toilet behind the door, the space is a tribute to the eighties, dominated by orange seating and dark brown melamine walls and table. A bookcase, desk and a couple of cupboards complete what will be my home for the next six weeks. It’s clean, functional, and, in spite of the décor, an excellent space for expedition meetings. If I need to get to the bridge I only have to climb one steep flight of stairs. Perfect.
The bridge is really the nerve center of a ship. It’s where the captain makes most of his decisions; where conditions are assessed, the route is set, reports made, and decisions logged. It’s the place to go to find out what’s happening. On entering the Shokalskiy’s bridge, the first thing that hits you squarely between the eyes is the view: large windows stretch all the way from port to starboard and give a stunning outlook, even over Bluff’s harbor. The captain’s chair and ship’s wheel sit front center, to the side of which a large TV-like screen glows menacingly green as the radar picks out the surrounding buildings. Small flickering monitors report on everything from the ship’s route to the weather and call signs of nearby vessels. Printed on a prominent sign at the front of the bridge is the Shokalskiy’s call sign, “UBNF,” in case someone should unforgivably forget. Banks of control panels fill the space, covered in brightly colored switches, with the Russian labels reminding us this is a Russian ship, run by a Russian crew.
Heading down the central staircase, we drop onto the upper deck, home to the medical room and ship’s lounge. This is the main thoroughfare through the ship where the noticeboards will post the daily itineraries and weather reports. The floor below has the labs and kitchen, flanked by the port and starboard dining areas of the main deck. The expedition bunk rooms are on these three levels. The cabins vary in size, with two to four wooden bunks fixed to the walls, all in the same décor as my room. All are tight on space, with bolted cupboards and bookcases for the inevitable rolling at sea. In the expedition manual, we describe it as third-class accommodation but with a five-class heart. That’s exactly how it feels.
As we work our way round the Shokalskiy, it quickly feels like we’ve moved into a new home. Although the bridge and cabins are quiet, the rest of the ship is busy. No matter where we go, someone is adapting, modifying, or packing away gear in preparation for departure. Boxes and crat
es are strewn everywhere, their contents spilling out across the floor. In the fluorescent-lit corridors, Russian crew bustle past, mumbling apologies as they rush to get the ship ready.
In the lounge, Aaron introduces us to the Heritage staff who will be on the voyage. Like everywhere else, the room is littered with half-empty boxes in various stages of unpacking, with books, biscuits, and crates of powdered coffee and Milo (a popular Australasian malt chocolate drink made by mixing with milk or water) piled high on tables and chairs. Nicola and Brad, our young New Zealand chefs, have cooked their way across the Southern Ocean for several years and have recently become engaged. They shake our hands enthusiastically and seem to tower over “Little Nikki,” the manager of the ship. Nikki is bright, bubbly, cheerful and no more than five foot tall. It’s her first voyage south, but she’s grown up at sea, helping her parents run a successful dwarf minke whale-diving operation in Queensland. The Heritage staff are the best in the business and friendly with it. I like them instantly and know we’re lucky to have them on board.
Down another flight of stairs at the rear of the ship, what was the second dining area is being converted to a laboratory. This is where most of the work on the voyage will be done, the focus for the research we’ve planned for the expedition. The melamine tables are nearly finished being covered in wooden panels to create benches. It’s a noisy, draughty space, with access to the rear outside deck on one side and the roar of the ship’s engine on the other. Diesel fumes linger in the air. Stacks of computer consoles, cables, drying cabinets, coring equipment and tubing lie waiting for a home among the chaos.
“This should work.” I turn to Chris. “What do you think?”
He walks into the adjacent room. Two large metal kitchen sinks run along the wall.
“Yeah, great. The computers can stay in the first room, and we’ll do the sieving and other wet prep in this space. With the access to the deck through here, we can also prepare any gear for deployment if it’s getting too rough outside.”
Everything feels like it’s falling into place.
Three Russian Orthodox icons look disapprovingly upon us from the laboratory walls. Ignoring their gaze, I pin up two maps: one shows the route from New Zealand to Antarctica, and the other our approach to Cape Denison. Both are covered in colored symbols and dates that set out our scheduled sampling locations. It will be a constant reminder of the task before us. Work is due to start from day one of the expedition.
A lecture room on the lower deck finishes off the tour of the communal spaces. It’s here I’ll hold the daily briefings to the team.
Like many of the ships of her class, the Shokalskiy has plenty of storage space on board. With all our science and field gear, we’re going to need it. The rear single-level hold is storing the sledges and the three all-terrain vehicles we have for the expedition; two are on loan from Heritage. The forward hold is narrower and deeper, accessed through a yellow hatch on the front deck. Fortunately, for the heavy gear there’s a small crane that can be used to move items between the hold and shore. The air in the hold is heavy with decades of oil, sweat and jute. Climbing down the two flights of steep metal steps, our footsteps echo in the rusting cavernous space. Chris’s partner, Eleanor, is already hard at work on the lower level and calls up a greeting. A Ph.D. student, Eleanor is a glaciologist with a keen sense of humor and an expert eye for small details. In spite of the semidarkness, she’s patiently completing the inventory with one of the Russian crew. The space is filling up fast, and all of it will have to be pushed and prodded to fill every nook and cranny. It seems disorganized, but there’s method in the madness. All kit has to be checked off, locked down and then double- and triple-checked. We’re about to head into the most unpredictable stretch of water on the planet, and we need to know everything has made it on board and is safely packed away. If anything breaks free, it will be a serious hazard.
Back on deck we hear raised voices. Heading aft, we find a group loudly discussing in broken English where to put a twelve-foot stainless-steel arm we’ve brought with us for the rear deck. This will hold the sonar head for mapping the seabed, and it will be swung out and lowered over the side by the ship’s crane. This is Chris’s baby. He’s spent the last few months working on the design with engineers so it will survive whatever the Southern Ocean throws at it. Unfortunately, it seems the best place to weld the arm to the deck is right on top of one of the fuel tanks.
“Damn!” says Chris, as one of the welding party starts to argue it should go on the port side, too far from the crane to be of use. He rushes over to put the Russian right on where the steel arm needs to be. I leave him to sort out a compromise.
* * *
Seventy-two hours later, I’m standing on the top deck of the Shokalskiy as she casts off.
This is a special moment. Two years of planning has come to this. Somehow, we’ve managed to find a ship and kit-out an expedition, and now we’re away on the first leg. Chris is standing nearby, smiling contentedly, the sonar arm just one of many jobs he’s sorted out with time to spare. A small army of people are milling about—scientists, students, teachers, and volunteers, all talking and laughing. It’s been a crazy few days, but when jobs had to be done, someone always stepped up.
I turn toward a roar and see some of the students happily looking at a group selfie they’ve taken. It’s exactly the atmosphere on board Chris and I wanted. We’re fortunate to have them all on the team.
For this expedition, we need great communicators. We’re hoping this expedition will be more than just reporting discoveries; we want to engage with people, to show them how science works. Over the last few months, I’ve been busy posting expedition news, highlighting our science plans, but I’m under no illusion about the amount of work during the forthcoming weeks. I’m going to be too busy leading the expedition. I need help from enthusiastic young researchers who can write blog posts, take photos and make short films of the work we’re doing, all to be splashed across the expedition website and our social media network by Anthony. Bastardizing an advert supposedly placed by Shackleton for his Endurance expedition, we’d made an international call: PhD volunteers sought for Antarctic science and adventure. This advertisement offering places on the expedition led to a deluge of two-minute YouTube applications. The brief was simple: Tell us why you want to join the expedition. The answers ranged from the passionate (“We need to do more to teach children about the world”) to the downright desperate (“I just have to go. Right?”). We chose fourteen brilliant Ph.D. students from the U.S., U.K., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; fourteen natural storytellers who would return home with experiences they’d treasure and that would guide them in their future careers in science.
I return my gaze forward. The sun is shining and there’s hardly a cloud in the sky. I can taste the warm, salty air. I breathe deeply and savor the moment.
It feels good to be leaving Bluff.
We just have the notoriously narrow harbour entrance left to negotiate. We’ll then be in the Foveaux Strait, the body of water that separates mainland New Zealand from Stewart Island and out beyond that, the Southern Ocean. Up ahead, a corridor of blue weather-beaten steel columns weaves a path through the messy surf, marking a way through the shallows. A small gray pilot boat leads us out as we cautiously approach the channel. A moment later, the Shokalskiy seems to accelerate, and I look over the side. Chaotic waves crash around us. There really is very little leeway on either side.
Suddenly we’re out in the open, the angry water replaced by long lazy swells. The ship’s horn blasts a farewell.
On the top deck, the increasing roll of the Shokalskiy is greeted by cheering.
We’re off.
* * *
Seven hundred years ago, one of the most courageous ever voyages set out into the Southern Ocean. History, though, has long forgotten the names of the explorers. We don’t know who they were or where they left from, but we do know that around the same time New Zealand was discovered by
Polynesians, a small group continued a wave of discovery that had begun two centuries before. Whatever their motivation, these brave individuals launched probably nothing larger than a double-hulled canoe into one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world. In the Southern Ocean, heavy seas are the norm rather than the exception; its storms are the stuff of legend, whipping the surface into a chaotic, foamy mess that threatens any vessel. When ships go down in these waters, they can just disappear—no wreck, no debris, nothing. It’s a fearsome place. And yet 700 years ago, a canoe somehow fought through 250 miles of these punishing seas to reach 50 degrees south, where it beached itself on a northern shore of the subantarctic Auckland Islands. No doubt exhausted and relieved at their success, the Polynesians camped, restocked and departed shortly after. Today, all that’s left of their extraordinary achievement are a few burnt-out campfires set in among the sand dunes, some small stone tools and a handful of dog-gnawed sea lion bones. Whether they made it back home we will never know. The islands appear to have been forgotten afterward until 1806 when a whaling ship stumbled upon them and staked a British claim.
When the great Antarctic explorer Sir James Ross visited the Auckland Islands on his way south in 1840, he considered “the many advantages this place possesses for a penal settlement.” But the dense thicket of “stag-headed vegetation,” aggressive sea lions, and wildly changing weather defied attempts at settlement by Europeans. People seldom stayed long, at least intentionally. Those unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked along its shores were forced to eke out an existence hoping for rescue one day, something that was not a foregone conclusion. Today all that remains are a small cemetery and a few scattered bricks and rotten planks among the trees and bushes, testament to the harsh reality of life on the subantarctics.
Although far from ideal for humans, the Auckland Islands are 241 square miles of all-too-rare real estate in the depths of the Southern Ocean. They may suffer a constant barrage of waves, wind, and rain, but the nutrient-rich offshore waters, forested slopes, and shallow east-facing bays make them a precious haven for wildlife. Until recently, seabirds, penguins, seals, and sea lions had flourishing populations, recovering after the mass slaughter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mysteriously, though, there’s been a collapse in many bird and seal populations. During the 1990s, biologists working on the Auckland Islands noticed that the recovery of New Zealand sea lions—sometimes called Hooker sea lions—was stalling. Alarmingly, numbers shortly after went into free-fall. With around 10,000 individuals left, the species has halved in just twenty years and is officially classified as “critical,” the most serious endangered category possible. It’s a pattern repeated across the New Zealand subantarctics. On Campbell Island, the small Rockhopper penguins started their decline earlier, with an extraordinary population collapse of 95 percent since the mid-twentieth century and no recovery in sight. With fishing no longer permitted around the islands and hunting long since banned, it’s suspicious that different species are hurting at a time when the climate is also changing across the region. A longer, more detailed study might just help us understand what’s going on.
