20-March - Return to Wellington.

20-March - Return to Wellington.

Weather calm and clear sky, - we are all busy scrubbing down the ship to get it looking good for arrival. A nice wallowing swell in the Cook Strait and up ahead are the green hills of the Wellington heads again. It’s always great to see your homeport again.

The end is nigh for what has been an epic voyage. It has opened my eyes to a corner of the world that I had never dreamed of getting to or really shown much interest in but for which I feel as if I have a special connection with now. This last wilderness frontier is truly a magnificent place. After experiencing the magnificence of this last wilderness on earth first hand, learning about and realizing the delicate balance of life that exists there, I have fears for the future of this land. There are serious threats that overshadows this magnificent wonderland and the iceberg sculpture garden, global warming, mans greed for natural resources as well as threats to ecosystems such as overfishing of Toothfish. All efforts be made to ensure sustainability and to ensure that the Ross Dependency will very soon not be another national park of New Zealand but actually part of the Antarctica International nature Park.

19-March –An Exhibition At Sea

19-March – An Art Exhibition At Sea

Somehow I had invited the whole ship into my cabin for a pre dinner drink tonight - the last night at sea. (Someone had overheard that my cabin was the largest cabin next to the Captain’s and somehow talked me into thinking this was a good idea).

The big problem to deal with today - how would I get 46 scientists and crew into my cabin? At lunchtime I had one of those bright moments - I would have an exhibition opening of the Antarctic paintings that I had completed on the voyage. So at afternoon smoko I taped them up in my cabin, + down the alleyway outside, had a nice chat with Brian, the cook and he agreed to bring in some nibbles in at about five-ish. I bribed the ‘Dutch club’, Else and Doc Jen to act as doormen, and spread the word that the official opening would be 1630 hours.
It all worked out great, I think the whole ship just managed to cram in somehow with the overflow in the alleyway gallery just outside. Then right on schedule, bang on 1700 hours, Cookie turned up with big plate sausage rolls and a plate of - you guessed it - smoked toothfish. It was a neat event - an enjoyable evening and a neat relaxed way to spend the last night of the voyage together. My fridge was empty once again ready for arrival back home.

18-March Camel Awards Night

18-March Camel Awards Night

The Big night tonight – the Camel Awards night- official dinner, awards and dance. I still hadn’t made a tie yet so got my paints out and quickly knocked one up, sort of did one in a Kandinsky abstract flavour and paper clipped it ton my shirt collar.

Started off with a pre dinner drink in the voyage leaders cabin, but there were too many of us to fit in so this spilled over into the Captains cabin. Someone then blurted out that my cabin was just as big and someone else decided that this being the case, pre dinner drinks would be in my cabin tomorrow night.

The galley laid on a specials dinner and this included Bryan's special Haggis, (I think it was the first time I tried it). The mate read our the Robby Burns rendition that goes with carving up a haggis and Captain Andrew piped the Haggis in playing Scotland The Brave, jazz style, on his sax.

After the official dinner came the awards, (each award being a special Ross Sea Erratic Stone mounted on a plaque stand. Of course the awards were mainly for bloopers and funnies, lots of laughs and some clever thinking for these.

Of course I had pulled the short straw though and is my day on duty - on the gear until 7am so must stay serious.

17-March - The Voyage home

17-March - The Voyage home

Sea still rough but we are heading north, not so cold today.

16-March Yet another storm brewing & rusty spotted kiwi.

16-March Yet another storm brewing & rusty spotted kiwi.

Yet another storm is brewing and heading our way but we have now changed course to head directly north to try and get out of it’s path. As we steam north I watch the huge waves from the stern and follow the royal albatross gliding on the air currents behind us, truly magnificent to watch. I spot a rusty spotted Kiwi on one of the stern trawl doors – we are heading home.

15-Mar Frozen Equipment

15-Mar Frozen Equipment. The ships side door wouldn’t go down this morning , was completely frozen with layers upon layers of sea ice. Sea spray that had washed over the area and frozen on impact during the previous day’s storm had built a healthy layer. So after our toolbox meeting, it was out with big sledge hammers and big ice picks to break the layers of ice off. Hanging over the side and swinging the hammers and picks with near frozen fingers.

14-March And Still More Snow

14-March And Still More Snow and storm - Deck covered again – there is now a heavy layer of ice all over the deck and is quite slippery in places.

13th March

13-March

Posters appear around the ships notice boards - Camel Awards night – 18th March.It’s to be a tidy affair and we are to wear ties. - Hmm a tie? – an items I never before ever considered packing into my sea kit bag – I think I will have to make one. A committee has been working very hard to put this night together and it is promising to be a night not to be missed. I do a quick calculation – dam – my turn to be ‘on the gear’ (on duty) for that particular night.

12-March Tabular Icebergs and Ice Caves

12-March Tabular Icebergs and Ice Caves

We passed more magnificent icebergs today – huge tabular icebergs with some huge blue caves being carved into their sides at sea level by wave action. I imagine the view being inside one of these caves looking out.

Bryan the cook loads up some photos onto the ships shared hard drive photo album, one of them is of his unique kind of iceberg as he imagined seeing from out of his galley porthole, a Ham berg. What will he come up with next?

11-March Aurora Australis

11-March Aurora Australis

Over the Admiralty Sea Mount today and more icebergs, the Balleny Islands are apparently not far off. The Balleny islands were discovered by the English whaling captains John Balleny and Thomas Freeman, 9th February 1839. The Ballenys consist of a string of islands stretching 195 km from north to south.

Bob woke me at 3am to say that an Aurora Australis was developing. I throw my overalls on (easiest way to get dressed quickly) and race up to the bridge. A wonderful sight to see the patterns of green light wave across the night sky..

Aurora Australis is one of the worlds most beautiful of all natural phenomena. It is generally thought that it is streams of naturally charged particles, positive electrons or protons shot from the sun at round the speed of light. The particles are thought to be pulled to the North and South magnetic poles of the earth. When the particles reach the outer atmosphere, 800 miles above, they strike atoms and molecules in this layer, stripping off the electrons and thus causing the light. Bob mentioned that it is quite possible that the directly overhead and curved pattern that we can see tonight is likely due to the our current close proximity to the magnetic south pole.
I tried to start a rumour about new species of electric eel that have set up breeding grounds around magnetic south. The negative females just hang around the pole and the more positive males swim towards them in auto pilot mode when they feel like it.

10-March storm

10-March storm

Storm again today and it is snowing. There is a nice clean white blanket on all the deck at the moment and mighty cold again. There are icebergs all around us and I am told we are actually now in iceberg alley, completely surrounded by icebergs. There are some magnificent ones in all shapes and sizes. At dusk I see my favorite one again, which I named ‘the castle’.

9-March The Firemans Helmet

9-March - The Firemans Helmet

After morning toolnox meeting we passed a beut non tablular iceberg we named the ‘Firemans Helmet’.

On station over and mapping the seamounts today. These are especially exciting spots for scientists as they often lead to discoveries of new species. A great variety of corals can be found on the volcanic rocks near the seamount peaks. Also found in abundance around seamounts is plankton which in turn attract the rest of the ecosystem.

8-March Scott Island.- day 2

8-March Scott Island.- day 2

The scientists spent the day exploring the seabed around Scott Island all day today.

Scientist, Kareen Schnabel, got all excited about the king crabs seen by the underwater camera and got some good footage and samples for her collection. Kareen cornered me today askign if could design a voyage T-shirt? So, together with Stephan, the Italian Scientist, we set to work on the design. We came up with several options and the crew voted on their favourite one - a view looking through a porthole with angler fish, a seapig, penguiins all topped off with a king crab creeping over the top.
This is one dramatic piece of rock, large areas of dark volcanic rock contrasting strongly with layers of white icing of the snow cap. Apparently during the winter, the whole island is covered by snow and ice. Feeling inspired by this rugged bit of rock, I start painting. Bob, the ice pilot, was impressed and mentioned interestingly that this might in fact be the first time that Scott island has ever been painted.

7-March Scott Island

7th March Scott Island – looms out of the storm and mist

Late this afternoon Scott Island loomed out of the mist - a couple of volcanic rocks that jut out of the middle of nowhere.
Scott Island is a small uninhabited island of volcanic origin off the northeastern extremity of Victoria Land. It is only 370 metres long and 180 metres wide, 50m high and covering an area of 4 hectares. Scott island is normally covered by an ice cap and surrounded by precipitous cliffs. There are two small coves with beaches on the island but the rest is made up of high cliffs. Just to the west of the island, Haggitt's Pillar sticks out like a saw thumb - a magnificent volcanic stack reaching over 60 metres above the sea level.
The island was discovered on Christmas Day 1902and landed upon by Captain William Colbeck, commander of the Morning, the relief ship for Captain Robert F. Scott's expedition. He named it Markham Island after Sir Clements Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society and the architect of the "Discovery".Haggitt's Pillar is named after William Colbeck's mother's family name, Haggitt. However the name was later changed in memory of Robert Falcon Scott.
Glen, the bosun, informed me how they had re-mapped this island on the previous voyage of the Tangaroa. It was apparently wrongly charted.

6-March The Castle & Antarctic Toothfish

6-March The Castle & Antarctic Toothfish

Saw a beautifully crafted iceberg today – it was too small to be given an official name so I named it the Castle, I think this one has got to be my favorite so far on the voyage. This one would actually be classed as a ‘Drydock’ type, as there was a empty section I the center with walls around it.

The crew caught another Antarctic toothfish today, 1.3m long weighing 34 kg, this was transported whole to the freezer space to join the giant squid caught the other day, both destined for Te Papa. This is a close relative to the patagonian toothfish, and normally caught around the edges of the Antarctic shelf and in the Ross Sea.

To taste - It’s is a very oily fish and comes under various names Mero mad Chilean sea bass, merluza negra and mero. Large adults occasionally exceeding 200 kilograms and thought to live up to fifty years and can reach a length up to 2.3 metres.

Another interesting fish that the ‘midwater’ trawls are bring up are the ‘Crocodile Ice Fish’. Interesting fish with gaping pointy mouths surrounded by transparent skin.

There was excitement when I found SQ whilst cleaning up in the workshop this afternoon. He had been hiding under the workbench. It turns out he must have fallen out of my pocket when in the workshop and did not drown after all. So looks like the ‘SQ sails home’ story shall continue.

5-March ‘Swedish Chef’ Iceberg

5-March Superglue Surgery and ‘Swedish Chef’ Iceberg

I nearly got stuck in the doctor’s surgery today – no, I wasn’t fixing anything in there but was nearly super-glued to the surgery table. Doc Jenny had spotted that some skin on my hands was splitting due to the cold and offered to super-glue the wounds closed again. She was a bit worried when my hand got momentarily glued to the surgery table due to stray drops though. Luckily the engine room alarm bleeper in my pocket didn’t go off and I managed to get free.

I think I must have been on this trip too long as I saw an iceberg this evening and could swear that it looked like one of the Muppets. I grabbed my glasses to make sure, as it was getting dark, but sure enough, to me anyway, it looked amazingly like the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show. – I thus officially named this one the ‘Swedish Chef’

4-March Ross Sea Sculpture Garden

4-March Ross Sea Sculpture Garden

While slowly zig zagging through the broken pack ice barrier, I found the amazing shapes of the sculptured ice very inspiring. This scene on a bright Antarctic summers day with pancake ice between the broken and shaped pack ice, made me think of a white lily pond in a sculpture garden.

I have been painting nearly every evening whilst on this voyage and it is proving to be a truly inspiring experience, the light and colour experienced is thrilling. I was reminded of a thought I had before leaving New Zealand, when I was packing my paints to take with me. The thought , ‘Antarctica would be easy to paint - lots of negative space painting’ I thought ie ‘I would just paint around the edges of the ice and leave the iceberg itself as the white of the paper’, (watercolour painting doesn’t normally use white paint). BUT experience has proved to be everything but, the icebergs show off a kaleidoscope of colours depending on the time of day and how the sun hits it and is reflected, how shadows fall. The colours also depending on the density of the ice, what part of the glacier it originated from.

3-March A double blow – Humpback Whales

3-March A double blow – Humpback Whales

Early in the afternoon there was considerable excitement onboard, crew running around the alleyways, grabbing their cameras and charging out onto deck. Very close to the port side of the ship, amongst the pack ice that we were slowly going through, were two magnificent humpback whales - a truly wonderful sight. They seemed to be oblivious to us being there and happily feeding on krill. I tested some positive thinking skills and willed the two whales to blow together for a good photo. Got my camera ready to shoot and waited - and sure enough in no time, they did. I captured this double blow with a sequence shoot.

Humpback whales are easy to distinguish, they have a stout body, distinctively long flippers with bumps and lumps upon which barnacles may grow. They are black to blue-black in colour on topside, weigh between 25-30 tonnes, can live for up to 50 years and measure between 12-14m in length, (females generally being larger than the males).

2-March Storm

2-March Storm

Yet another storm and horizontal snow, a blizzard really. Antarctica extremely important to the worlds weather system – it really is the storm factory of the great southern ocean

1st March - Frozen Equipment

1-Mar Problems with Frozen Equipment

We were kept on our toes the last few days with more things falling over because of the extreme low temperatures. Yesterday the winch system wouldn’t operate and the control airline was found to be blocked with ice. Moisture must have somehow got into the system and frozen in the lines. To top it all off this morning, we couldn’t pump out a sewage tank; we eventually found that the two-inch diameter discharge pipe was frozen solid. No wonder the pump was struggling and had given up trying to suck up a slug of frozen sewage/greywater.