It takes us a week to reach the ice, to ‘cross the line” and reach Antarctic waters. Scientific work began from the time we reached the open sea off Tasmania. Our first week was spent deploying and retrieving moorings, assembling and testing scientific equipment, preparing the labs and setting up work teams.
The week includes three big occasions: Christmas day, the King Neptune ceremony and the sighting of the first iceberg. It is a time of building excitement. The journey to the ice is filled with expectation and wonder, as the temperature drops and another world is entered.
From the second navigator’s chair on the bridge you can see a gently rolling sea, as well as the wandering albatross gliding low over the waves, dipping wingtips before curling up and over. We can really feel the ship rolling over the waves. The body prostrate feels like a sack of water being drawn up and down and in all directions with the rise and fall of the sea. Doctor has been dispensing seasickness tablets.
We cruised up and down through loose pack ice against a spectacular backdrop of massive tabular ice bergs - glacial ice, hundreds of metres high, which has come off the continent and broken apart into huge islands forming a line across the horizon as they sit grounded against a deep-sea canyon wall.
The sound of the ship moving through ice.