O Y S TER NEWS
“WE ARRIVE, AS SHACKLETON DID, FROM THE WEST, AND ANCHOR IN KING HAARKEN BAY”
T e next four and a half days pass in a fl ash and conditions are much better than we’d feared. T e sea is good, not too rough. We’ve had almost three days of light winds, in fact, we’ve had to use the engine for two of them. Just one little glitch one night when the wind got up to 35/40 knots but that didn’t last long. On the fourth day we see Shag Rocks and feel we’ve come home, just 100 miles to go to the island – a breeze.
T e smell of the seaweed fl oats out to meet us and the rocks are covered in kelp. It’s impossible to land, and we are conscious that the albatrosses and other birds wouldn’t like it anyway. Finally, we see South Georgia, the fi rst mountains, the fi rst rocks, the fi rst bays. We arrive, as Shackleton did, from the west, and anchor in King Haarken Bay, where he and his men also anchored. We can’t get the condition they were in when they arrived in their little boat out of our minds: how wet, starving and terrifi ed they must have been.
A far cry from ourselves almost a 100 years later as we glide in, in complete safety, on board our Oyster 72, not having suff ered a bit! But we do
feel a sense of relief at being able to drop anchor aſt er all those days of open sea and uncertainty. T e noise of the chain running is like the sound of the key in the front door when you’re getting back from work in the evening, peace and security at last!
We go ashore and fi nd ourselves in a grassy landscape with distant snow-capped peaks, rushing steams and rivers. A glacier looms at the end of the valley, the sun is shining bright and hot and we see our fi rst animals: sea lions, fur seals and penguins with their young.
Our climbers are almost arthritic aſt er fi ve days of inactivity. T ey prepare their skis, crampons and picks in a trice and are off to conquer those peaks. We take our time gathering up our skis and crampons, and begin the Shackleton ascent. Suddenly it becomes very busy, anyone who ventures here equips themselves with tents, skis and pulks and does the same trip. It’s two or three days’ walking, which isn’t diffi cult but of course you’ve got to camp en route. T e toughest bit is negotiating the cracks that open up, mostly in January and February when there isn’t as much snow and the glacier splits.
But we just do a few hours’ walking. We’ve no intention of spending the night away from the boat or sleeping ashore and we don’t have a permit to do so anyway. One of the trickiest parts of organising the trip was fi nding out about and requesting a permit to come to this island by boat. But it was only aſt er we’d been granted that permit thanks to the good work of Tim, that we realised it didn’t include sleeping ashore. To do that we’d have had to request an expedition permit which is another kettle of fi sh entirely and much more complex to boot. But everything goes well all the same, our climbers are fantastic and will certainly manage to do all they want to in a day without any need to spend the night ashore. T at can wait for next time. It’s always better to just try to see as much as possible the fi rst time, tour the whole island, get to know it and where the best places are or at least the ones we like most. T en next time, we can focus on a particular goal, request an expedition permit and scale a few virgin peaks!
Even on this fi rst day, the climbers manage to climb two mountains, one of which has never been scaled before.
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