O Y S TER NEWS
“WE KEEP SAILING DAY AFTER DAY. WE STOP OFF IN
INCREDIBLE BAYS, SOMETIMES WITH ONLY SHIPWRECKS FOR COMPANY, OTHERS NOTHING AT ALL.”
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.
We, however, are thwarted by fog and aſt er a few hours on the glacier return to the shore where we enjoy our fi rst adventures with the fur seals. Tim had warned us that fur seals attack humans, particularly at this time of year because they are protecting their pups. He gave us long sticks to keep them at bay but none of us really believed him. We thought it was just an old sea dog telling tall tales, but we were quickly proved wrong – fur seals do attack and quite viciously! First they stare at you and then they growl and snarl or whatever it is they do. If at that point, you don’t get out of their sight pronto, they’ll go for you very, very aggressively.
T eir sharp teeth, stinking breath and big heavy bodies really are quite frightening up close. We’ve also been told that fur seal bites are very dangerous indeed because they tend to become infected very easily. Our fi rst encounter is straight out of central casting: a large fur seal sees us, snarls at us, and we just stand there rooted to the spot, holding our sticks but doing nothing. T en she gets really angry and goes for us, so we take off at a run… with her behind us.
A far cry from ourselves almost a 100 years on as we glide in in complete safety, not having
She’s fast too, luckily she quickly runs out of breath and lets us be. T is time we survived unharmed but we realise that we need to keep on our toes in future.
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 get underway again the following day, which is gloriously sunny with a cloudless sky, calm sea and barely a breath of wind. We sail along the south coast of the island where there isn’t much in the way of shelter and then dock at Cooper Bay on the westernmost tip. T is proved to be one of our best days in all our months and years in the southern hemisphere – the magnifi cent weather, those incredible mountains! T e snow, grass, black rock and sea off ering a unique contrast. Penguins in the water. All we needed to complete the perfect picture is a killer whale or two. But unfortunately we didn’t see any at all, just as we didn’t see any in the Antarctic or at Cape Horn. T e killer whale in fact is the only local animal that the South has denied us. But on the plus side, that provides us with a good excuse to come back again in another few years!
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 became 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.
We anchor in Larsen Bay. T ere’s bad weather on the way and we need somewhere calm and sheltered. T is place is really safe, rocky walls tumble into the sea in a long, narrow f ord that ends in a glacier. T e fact that it’s not only safe but spectacular is clear from the cruise ship that arrives and discharges its passengers in infl atables to wield their cameras and stock up on some fantastic memories.
T en, coincidence of coincidences, an infl atable approaches Billy Budd. Inside is Kim, an English researcher and a great Arctic and Antarctic expert who had been North with us. She brought with her a group of children and boxes of M&Ms. T e cruise is sponsored by the company that makes the latter and of course the kids give us tonnes of them.
We keep sailing day aſt er day. We stop off in incredible bays, sometimes with only shipwrecks for company, others nothing at all. It’s always just us and we’re always fl anked by incredibly huge icy, snow-covered mountains and seracs that run almost all the way down to the sea. Crazy colour contrasts: whites, blacks, blues, greens.
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!
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