Buenos Aires - Monday, March 6
I write this from my hotel in BA after a couple of days rich with incident as our Victorian predecessors might have said. I’m writing this in haste as I’m leaving shortly for the airport and my flight home but I did want to post an update before I left.
Interestingly, I’m looking out at my hotel room window at a phenomenon that I’ve never seen quite so well illustrated. The sky is very high and very blue and there are two layers of intermittent clouds clearly delineated. One layer is swiftly passing in from of me from right to left and the higher layer is scudding by from left to right., absolutely diametrically opposite directions but perfectly synchronised as to speeds and directions.
I started to tell you about my final days on Le Boreal. In my last post I described my first day on SGI on Sunday, February 27. As we were at sea on March 3 when I wrote of these events, what I didn’t say was that on February 27, the captain announced that there was a single case of a crew member testing positive for Covid. This was baffling because we all, crew and passengers, had been given PCR tests and a Negative result was required to enter the ship. This test was in addition to the tests that we all had to take to meet Argentinian entry requirements. For a case to arise after a lapse of 10 days at sea seemed, curious. We were all assured that all steps would be taken, it was only a one off, safety protocols would be increased, etc. This is not intended to make light of it but simply to say that the sense seemed to be that it was a statistical outlier, an anomaly.
On the morning of Monday Feb 28 we had sailed to St Andrews Bay, the site of the largest King Penguin rookery in the world, approximately 400,000 breeding pairs! It was equivalent to my first day on SGI but obviously scaled an order of magnitude in noise, density and rapacity of scavengers. Having said that, the penguins whose chorus now rivalled the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, were as friendly, unthreatening and curious as ever. The number of seal pups was also scaled up and they bounded, sniffed us and chased each other in packs, pups is the operative descriptor, well named.
By the afternoon of Feb 28 the ship had moved up the coast to Grytviken, a well-sheltered bay surrounded by the largest flat sections of habitable land on the island, however there are no longer any permanent residents there. It too was the site of a whaling station, now thankfully abandoned, but one of the most productive and industrialised examples of its type which sadly was in operation until 1966 when there were no longer enough whales left for it be economically viable. As a mind-searing statistic, it was an important cog in the machinery which caught and killed 3,000,000 whales in the 20th century. Because whaling was an industrial process, its activities were recorded as accounting entries in the ships’ books of record and the number of whales killed and processed, 3 million, is definitively known.
Grytviken’s other claim to fame is that it is the site of Ernest Shackleton’s grave, in a small cemetery on the side of a hill looking over the bay and a vast distance away, his Irish home. I, and most of my fellow passengers, climbed up the hill to his grave and spent a quiet moment reflecting on the extraordinary life that he lived.
“He led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. Disaster struck this expedition when its ship, Endurance became trapped in pack ice and was slowly crushed before the shore parties could be landed. The crew escaped by camping on the sea ice until it disintegrated, then by launching the lifeboats to reach South Georgia Island , a stormy ocean voyage of 720 nautical miles (1,330 km; 830 mi) and Shackleton’s most famous exploit.
In his 1956 address to the British Scientific Society, Sir Raymond Priestly, one of his contemporaries, said “Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” A worthy tribute to one of the last of the great Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen explorers.
That evening back on the ship we learned that there were now 5 new Covid cases.
On March 1, we spent our last day on SGI. We anchored in Fortuna Bay where a number of passengers landed to begin a 6k hike from their landing spot to Stromness, the next bay to the north of Fortuna. As the weather was gloomy, cool and very foggy I did not join them but spent the day warm and dry and battling the last of a vicious cold. The ship then sailed up to Stromness where we picked up the hardier specimens of our passenger list who had completed the hike, raised our anchor and set out for the Falkland Islands.
The following day, March 2 at sea, the captain announced that there were now 4 additional cases, both crew and passengers. One of the two restaurants was closed, no self-serve salad bar, temperatures were taken before entry to the restaurant and we were encouraged to continue to sit at the same tables and create temporary eating bubbles with the same tables and neighbours.
On March 3rd at sea, where and when I wrote my previous post, we learned that there were now 3 new cases, again both passengers and crew. We were due to arrive at the Falklands the following day Friday March 4 where we had planned to anchor and land our zodiacs to explore the landscape. Our daily briefings from the captain were de rigeur and were now met with the expected degree of anxiety by many aboard. This day we learned that the Governor of the Falklands had decided, not surprisingly, that we were too great a health risk to his citizens and we were not going to be allowed to land.
Cape Horn
The picture above is Cape Horn at its most benign!
The following day March 4 we instead sailed around the islands and in brilliant sunshine and very warm temperatures saw all the places and the wildlife that we did not have the chance to explore from our zodiacs. There was a silver lining however. Because we did not stop at the Falklands we were about a half day ahead of schedule which put us ahead of a storm system that we would have had to deal with had we been able to keep to our original itinerary. In addition, because the Beagle Channel, the body of water between the Southern Ocean and the town of Ushuaia, is east of Cape Horn, we would not in the ordinary course events have had the opportunity to “round the Horn”. Using our day of grace however, we would now sail round the Horn ahead of the bad weather and then head back and up the Beagle to Ushuaia. So on the morning of March 5 the whole ship was tested for Covid, a requirement for our landing back in Argentina on the following day March 6, and then over the course of the afternoon of March 5 we sailed around the Horn in very clement, un-Hornlike weather. Having now officially, if only technically, rounded the Horn we all have the lifelong privilege, reserved for sailors who have made this passage, to wear a gold ring in our left ear and to eat with one foot on the table. I’m not sure V will be thrilled with either of those possibilities.
Finally, amidst great tension and anxiety, we received our test results on the evening of March 5, 24 new cases of Covid! Thankfully I was Negative hence my rushing to write this before boarding my flight for home. Nonetheless, there are 37 passengers and crew who are now in quarantine in Ushuaia. A fabulous voyage but tempered by a very distressing finale.
More to come!
