Wednesday, 14th February 2007, Deception Island:
Overnight, the 'Antarctic Dream' has headed North, crossed the Bransfield Strait and returned to the South Shetland Islands. This morning, we are to visit the volcanic island of Deception, which last erupted as recently as 1970. The island is the 'caldera' - an almost-complete circle five miles across. Sea access to the caldera is through a narrow, hazardous passage called Neptune's Bellows. I'm on the bridge just after 5.00 am, with other passengers, to watch the captain bring the 'Antarctic Dream' from the open water into the placid lagoon within. We then head for our first landing place at Telephone Bay.
All the passengers are by now quite accustomed to donning parkas, gumboots and lifejackets and lining up to turn their token from green to red on the board which indicates when people have left the ship. Each Zodiac normally takes ten passengers so it doesn't take too long to get people ashore, although it's the first time we've done it at 6.30 in the morning! Everything is black gravel, actually pumice and ash from the eruption 35 years ago. It's a bleak but impressive landscape. In a few places, green litchens have established a precarious foothold but no other living things are obvious, until we encounter a solitary penguin undergoing a moult. It looks rather sad but is probably fine - penguins can last for a month without food or water and, well before that, it should have returned to its natural element, the sea. We climb a couple of hundred feet, but it's reasonably easy going over the black ash. We can now see that there are a number of new craters, slowly filling with water, in addition to the huge sea-filled original crater where our ship waits, looking like a toy from our lofty vantage point. There is no sound and it seems a good place to sit and contemplate our incredible world. Within an hour, we make our way back to the ship for a welcome and well-deserved breakfast, whilst our floating restaurant manoevres us to Pendulum Cove.
At 9.00am, those of us with the stamina disembark a second time, improbably for a swim. The beach is the usual black, fine gravel but to the right of our landing spot, clouds of steam are rising from the beach and drifting out to sea in the light wind. Two seamen from our ship have dug a shallow collecting pool and hot melt water is running from the pool to the sea. We remove our lifejackets and outer clothing and, clad only in swimsuits, run down to the sea below the collecting pool. I'm in the first group of four and, sitting down in the shallows, I'm relieved to find that the sea is slightly warm. However, each wave brings in rather cold water from the bay, so we quickly adopt the technique of lying on our front in the black gravel, covered in seawater but carefully positioned so that the hot water from the collecting pool is cooled by the seawater to keep a pleasant temperature around the body. This way, it's delightful. Sweeping the arms in a wide arc can be used to promote the water mixing, or the hands can be plunged into the warm gravel to release the heat. Julio keeps encouraging us to go into deeper water where he assures us the water becomes warmer but I find that any attempt to move out exposes me to cold water so, like most of the bathers, I stay where I am comfortable. One particularly brave American girl with experience of cold water swimming strikes out a few yards, but quickly returns saying the water was the coldest she'd ever been in. With some reluctance, I left my warm bath, ran up the beach, towelled down and dressed. It's a bit worrying to be standing in a wet swimsuit and nothing else when all the spectators were in full bad-weather garb with heavy gloves! All the bathers said they enjoyed the experience but a number said that drying out on the beach was the worst bit. To my surprise, I did not think it was so bad. Perhaps this is a consequence of living in a cold country like England. Anyhow, before 10.00 am we were back on the ship and there was just time to have another warm bath and put on dry clothes ready for our third landing of the day at 10.30 am. I had inadvertently brought back quite a bit of black gravel in my swimsuit and I later found that the other bathers had had an identical experience.
By the time I was ready to go, the Captain had moved the ship to our landing position in Whaler's Bay and, for the last time, the Zodiac drivers take us ashore. On the short journey, we could see the remains of the long-abandoned whaling factory. This was established around 1910 and continued iin use until about 1932, superceded by more "efficient" factory ships. Before inspecting the factory, part of our group walked along the shore with Rodrigo to check out the wildlife. We found a number of small groups of fur seals enjoying the mild weather. We gave them a wide berth, and they just watched us go past. But one particularly aggressive male decided to come across the beach apparently to threaten me. I stopped, slowly retreated a yard, but after a pause, he advanced again. Rodrigo came up and discouraged the fellow with some well-judged stick waving, until the seal went back to harrassing another seal. We carried on to near the end of the beach and climbed the inside of the caldera until, a hundred feet or so up, a gap in the rocks, almost like a missing tooth in a lower jaw, gave us stunning views of the open sea and the wildlife.
Before we left, I was determine to check out the remains of the factory. My distaste for whaling means that I have never studied the processing involved but, confronted by this industrial archaeology, I felt the need to consider the functions needed to help to understand what I was looking at. But I had a mere 30 minutes to look at the site. More on the factory here.
Pictures.
More pictures.
South Atlantic Swimming Club pictures.
