Category: Journal

Not only is Saunders Island an even more amazing place than Sea Lion Island, but the sun reappeared this afternoon — I was beginning to fear it had burnt out. The FIGAS flight was again scenic, although I had my seatbelt fastened as tightly as possible due to the high winds. The several stops included two grass airstrips, one of which had three small hills on it — takeoffs are a bouncy enough affair normally, but doing it on a roller-coaster airstrip adds a whole new element to the event.

Once the plane arrived at Saunders I was met by David Pole-Evans, the very nice owner of the island. He reminded me a bit of John Goodman, and has been living on the farm long enough that he can make an expression like “righty-o” sound quite natural. It took an hour by Landrover to drive out to the cabin on the Neck, and now that I’m here I’ve got the place to myself for two nights. The landscape outside is a spit of land between two mountains that is loaded with wildlife and bordered by large white-sand beaches. While hiking the black-browed albatross were flying by so close I thought one might hit me, rockhopper penguins roamed past me as if I wasn’t there, gulls followed me in flocks, and a pod of dolphins was swimming about ten meters offshore. Life is indeed very good right now.

I stayed up most of the night checking election results, and despite the fact that Kerry led exit polls for total vote, Ohio vote, and Florida vote by two-to-three percent he appears to have lost all three by a similar margin. I don’t know much about exit polls, but statistically the result seems a bit sketchy. The prospect of four more years of Bush doing whatever he wants without consequence (since he doesn’t need to worry about re-election) is a very scary one.

The day’s weather matched my mood, with clouds and occasional rain for most of the day. It’s a photographer’s nightmare — an incredible amount to photograph, but no light to do so. Still, just walking around is nice, and getting an occasional orca sighting is a thrill. Tomorrow it’s off to Saunders Island and, with luck, better weather.

For various reasons I’ve been having trouble falling asleep lately, and as a result couldn’t drag myself out of bed until nearly an hour after sunrise. The weather has alternated from cloudy to rainy, but between getting pelted by rain I’ve managed to revisit the rockhopper colony and also explore a bit on the other side of the island, which has some brilliant sandy beaches with handfuls of elephant seals on them. There have again been caracaras and an orca sighting, although my favorite part of the day has been the little birds, including the tussoc birds which come so close that I often have to try to avoid stepping on them. I’ve not yet figured out if they’re curious, near-sighted, or just lonely, but it’s definitely neat to have a couple of small birds only inches away.

Both the plane service and Sea Lion Lodge lost my bookings, but through the heroic efforts of Ms. Kay McCallum (“Ah, you need to give ’em hell occasionally”) the airport manager was roused at home and all was soon put right. The FIGAS planes are awesome — we buzzed above the landscape at about two hundred feet, and it was more like a sightseeing trip than just a ride out of Stanley. We touched down on the dirt landing strip on Sea Lion Island, and the staff here is mostly Scottish so the beauracracy of the Falklands disappeared amidst some great accents.

Sea Lion Island itself is amazing enough that I’m a bit worried I may have booked the best first. I hiked a good bit of it today, had caracaras following me, saw an immensely busy colony of blue-eyed shags and rockhopper penguins, got lost in tussock grass taller than I was, and watched three killer whales swimming offshore. I’m planning on trying to be up for sunrise tomorrow, so with luck I’ll hopefully get a few pictures that show off the beauty of the place.

Beautiful weather today for a bit of roaming, but there doesn’t appear to be a lot in the immediate vicinity of Stanley that is of particular interest. Internet access is a huge pain, but I’ve still been trying to catch up a bit on the news:

• It sounds like the election will be ridiculously close, which is scary.
• The Sox broke the curse (wow!)
• The Browns have simultaneously discovered how to score and forgotten how to defend.
• The Onion reports that Cheney will attack America himself if Kerry wins.
• Ohio State football has collapsed completely and is now unranked.
• And otherwise life seems more-or-less unchanged.

Stage two of the trip starts tomorrow as I’ll be off to the outlying islands for twelve days.

There is a good chance that my internet access will disappear soon, so if the updates stop they should resume again by the second week of November. And yes, I know most of the South Georgia pictures are broken, but it’s just too expensive to upload them all right now so I’ll fix it in a couple of weeks from Chile.

Everyone else left for the airport about two hours ago, with Micky and Shane nearly missing the bus despite the fact that there’s only one flight a week — apparently they found a badmitton court and couldn’t be bothered to stop their game early. Seeing them stroll back to the boat as the bus was arriving was an act brazen enough to rate up there with Micky’s call for beers back at Trollhul. Afterwards I ate a quick lunch with Jerome, Kathy and Jerome’s son Dion before heading off to Kay McCallum’s bed and breakfast — after living on a boat for a month the luxury of a full-size bed, carpet and a good glass of tea makes this place feel like a palace.

Tonight was the last night together for the passengers and crew of the Golden Fleece, and no one wanted to go to bed. We all went out to dinner, waited an hour and a half for the food to come, then returned to the boat, drank a bit, and talked about everything from milking horses to smuggling Incan sword hilts to an Osama vs. Bush pay-per-view match. At one point Mike mixed Budweiser and milk together (I can’t recall what prompted it) and the resulting concoction was actually not all that bad. There was a lot of laughter, and I’m writing this now thinking that I’m going to miss this group greatly once everyone heads off to the airport tomorrow. I started out knowing the trip would have its lonely moments, but I didn’t suspect that parting with fellow passengers would be such a big one.

The Malvinas House Hotel has a sauna room with shower and jacuzzi that is rented out for four people at about twenty-five dollars an hour. After getting only two showers while on the boat, exiting the sauna room I was a god on Earth; whoever it was that built it should be given sainthood.

After the three days of hell on the seas the winds calmed yesterday afternoon, and we had comparatively smooth sailing until our arrival in Stanley at mid-morning. Upon landing Micky did a swan dive into the dock and held on firmly, and it’s safe to say that none of the rest of us will ever again take stable ground for granted.

My opinion of Stanley has changed somewhat now that I’ve had more time to visit — while it’s still a beautiful setting, there is beauracracy built into every facet of life here. One in three people (man, woman and child) works for the government, and even getting a table in an empty restaurant involved putting our name on a list, waiting five minutes for the bar to open, then waiting twenty minutes in the bar for the girl to come get us, and after all of that hassle the food still ended up being pretty horrid.

The day’s other big event was a quest for internet access. After an ungodly long search I was able to connect my laptop for twenty pence (thirty-eight cents) per minute, after which I had to wait forty-five minutes to download over six hundred spam messages and about thirty real emails. Pictures from the trip will be probably be broken until I reach Chile in two weeks since it would cost an amazing sum to get all of them uploaded.

We’re now off for dinner at a (hopefully) better restaurant, followed by an evening in the pubs — the only thing that isn’t expensive here is alcohol, and after five days without much merriment everyone seems ready to take full advantage.

With (hopefully) only one more day at sea everyone has acquired a morbid but resigned look — our options at this point are to keep enduring or to jump overboard, neither of which are particularly good. I haven’t seen Ted in three days, Micky has been prostrate on a couch for forty-eight hours, and Mike (who isn’t taking any motion-sickness drugs) has had the look of a deer in headlights every time I’ve seen him recently. Provided we do make land tomorrow there will be more than one person kissing the dock.

In the words of Shane, “What kind of shit have I gotten myself into now?” Winds are sustained at thirty-to-forty knots, waves are twelve-to-fifteen feet, and the boat is jumping like a Mexican bean. With the assistance of drugs my vision is horribly blurred but I’m not feeling ill, although several of the fellow passengers have been heaving forth with great gusto throughout the day. One thing they don’t tell you about rough seas is that while walking around is very, very tough, using the bathroom is practically a gymnastic event.

Today is not going to be anyone’s favorite day of the trip — the seas have gotten progressively choppier to the point where now the motion of the boat is extraordinarily sudden and in random directions, making for a sickening passage. I’m having to write this while lying down and with one leg braced against the wall to keep steady. The only notable events today were two groups of hourglass dolphins that did some bow-riding for a bit, and twice when the engines mysteriously died. Stanley can’t get here fast enough.

After a minor storm yesterday in which the boat was pitching at least forty degrees to port and thirty degrees to starboard the seas have calmed a bit today, but I think I actually prefer the larger swells to the choppiness we’re now going through. It will be none too soon when we arrive in Stanley. The day’s only real highlight occurred minutes after I first went up to the wheelhouse and a small whale popped up literally feet from our bow. Amazingly none of the three other people in the wheelhouse saw it despite the fact that the whale came half out of the water, although David saw his dorsal fin twice thereafter. Otherwise it’s been a long, slow day at sea.

We landed with terribly rough seas on Willis Island this morning, worked our way through a crowd of fur seals, climbed some rocky cliffs, and then paid an incredible visit to the black-browed, grey-headed, and light-mantled sooty albatross on the island. We’re now sailing across the open ocean on our return trip to the Falklands, but already I want to go back to South Georgia; the place is magical.

Sadly our last full day in South Georgia ended up being spent on the boat — we had a six hour drive from Fortuna to Elsehul, and along the way dropped Ted, Shane and Mike off to hike over to meet us. The weather wasn’t particularly nice when we dropped them off, and Jerome commented that “ils sont fous” shortly after leaving them. Pulling into Elsehul a couple of hours later we got a call on the satellite phone from Ted saying that the wind had dropped visibility to zero, so we made a U-turn and went back to pick them up. I had been joking with Jerome that he needed more sleep and should let me take the wheel, and he surprised me by taking me seriously, so for an hour I was doing my best not to get us all killed by scanning the waves for ice while being buffeted by sixty-mile per hour winds. In fairness the autopilot and GPS made the job a fairly easy one despite the weather, but it was still a hell of a way to learn to drive the boat.

It was a late night last night, with special cocktails from Jerome and a delicious fondu — definitely a good time. This morning we motored through relatively choppy seas to Fortuna Bay where the weather was amazing — sunny and warm, with occasional wind. Around the glacier at the head of the bay the wind was strong enough that you could lean into it at a forty-five degree angle, but elsewhere it wasn’t nearly as powerful. I spent the entire time roaming amongst the animals, including a lot of time in a gentoo penguin colony up on a hillside and at a precarious perch on a cliffside with a light-mantled sooty albatross. At midday one of the icebergs in the bay fell to pieces — it was a tall one, and the first half of it collapsed with a loud crash before the other side broke off, throwing up a cloud of ice and water that must have been at least ten stories high. Later, a few hours before sunset, the sun dipped behind the mountains and colored some of the high clouds into greens, purples and reds — it was something I’ve never seen before. All in all an excellent day.