Paradise Bay, Antarctica - Tuesday Feb 22

We sailed from Danco Island in the morning and arrived at Paradise Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula in the early afternoon. Paradise Harbour/Bay is one of only two usable harbours for passenger boats in Antarctica. The bay is surrounded by sharply-edged and heavily glaciated mountainous peaks and massive domes of snow covering the whole landscape.

There is an option available for those who choose to take advantage of it, of a sea kayaking expedition to explore the bay. I decided to take advantage of it although never having kayaked before. My expectation was that it would be sufficiently akin to canoeing that I would be able to pick it up fairly quickly, unfortunately, not a very well-founded assumption. It certainly looked attractive, gliding smoothly through the water like a seal and communing with nature in all its elemental glory. Plus the sun was shining out of a lapis sky, the first time we have seen the sun since we left Ushuaia, and so feeling doubly blessed I layered up with a merino bottom layer, two more layers and finished with an immersion suit in case of a dunking. The immersion suit is mandatory and needs two people to pull it on, latex seals at the neck and wrists and a number of watertight zippers that can only be secured by a second person. The immersion suit provides no warmth, not its purpose, so while it kept the water out it do not keep out the effects of the wind which seemed to blow right through it. This was not a problem initially but after having worked up a good sweat paddling, the suit ensured that the water inside the suit, my sweat, could not evaporate but it could get quickly chilled by the wind if I sat still for long.

So to begin my adventure and in blissful ignorance of what was to come, I performed one of those sets of activities guaranteed to remove any last shreds of dignity remaining to one at my age and stage of life. We all retain some desperate hope of appearing elegant and competetant to the rest of the world, so it is fortunate that there were no videos taken of me clambering into the kayak. We were initially taken out to the middle of the bay in a zodiac which towed 4 kayaks and the launching pontoon, the pontoon being nothing more than a sturdy floating mattress about 3 metres long and 2 metres wide. The mattress was tied on to one side of the zodiac and one by one, the kayaks were brought to the other side of the mattress and securely tied there as people climbed into them. The trick is getting from the zodiac into the kayak. This required rolling out of the zodiac, over its side and landing on the mattress, on which because of its flimsy nature, one could not stand but perforce must roll or crawl across to the kayak. The next problem then became entering the kayak, which again meant crawling feet first into the designated seating spot while trying desperately not to tip the kayak and its contents into the ocean or falling in oneself while trying to scramble aboard. Ungainly and awkward does not begin to cover it!

However once in and away we began the next in a long series of required actions which needed to be mastered, or at least approached within shouting distance of competence. Unfortunately it had not occurred to me to study closely the method of propelling a kayak. For those of you familiar with the process this will undoubtedly sound very ho hum but the cadence of strokes is at a much higher tempo than in a canoe and because in a two seater kayak the two paddlers are much closer together than in a canoe, not being in cadence has the potential to cause many more problems. In a canoe not being in cadence is not a good thing, wasted effort and inefficient progress but in a kayak the paddles can easily collide with each other or become entangled, not good. And the paddling motion is so different, the kayak seat is only a couple of inches high so you are essentially sitting on your tail on the bottom of the kayak with legs straight out in front of you. This position means that every time you move your hips you change the balance of the craft and tip it on one side or another. This requires the paddling motion to come smoothly from the shoulders with no motion possible from the hips to add impetus to the stroke.

I was fortunate in having a very experienced partner who sat in the rear seat, the captains seat, where she had control of the rudder and set the pace of paddling. It was almost magic, could have been magic with a little more experience, but the scenery was stunning, the light was brilliant, the air was relatively warm, about 2C, the sun was shining and I was paddling a kayak in Antarctica!

We spent about an hour and three quarters exploring the bay, watching the birds, looking at the landscapes and hoping to catch sight of a whale, which fortunately we did, a humpback rising briefly above the surface about a hundred metres away. Sadly no pictures, I had a GoPro but was just too busy obeying my captains commands to “paddle G, paddle”. I have to confess that I have not been nearly as active during Covid as I should have so was calling into action muscles that I had not pushed to my limit in over two years and I felt it. At points during our journey, as I felt my heart careening along at a furious pace, I thought that it would be poetic justice if the last words I heard on this earth were “paddle G paddle!!”

Getting back onto the zodiac was even more humiliating as it featured all the steps that I have already outlined but superadded was the fact that my arms and legs were so tired that I could barely crawl out of the kayak and crawl my way back to the zodiac, during which in the course of clambering aboard, I fell headfirst into the bottom of the Zodiac on my back. I could only lie there, in the bottom of the boat looking up at the brilliant sky and laugh my head off.

The final capping moment was then taking the zodiac to the shore and setting foot on the fabled continent!

More to come!