We woke tied-off to the rusted hulk of a half-sunken Norwegian whaling ship. Its story is legend along the Peninsula for having caught fire a century ago during a sail-away party, its stores of whale oil afire lighting up the sky for several days. Now it is just another ruined reminder of those boom days when Antarctica’s whales were one of the world’s biggest producers of oil for lighting and heat.
Today is one of those days down here that you wish you could be sitting by some kind of warm fire, whether in the comfort of your living room or a preferably a bonfire. At eight this morning it is thirty-four degrees and raining, conditions which began yesterday and promise to be with us for at least two more. Thanks to satellite imagery we are able to track the weather up to five days in advance, more or less; at the very least we know when high and low pressure systems are on the way and from what direction to expect the winds.
Wet Penguins
Loading into a hypalon Zodiac — Graham Charles, an old friend of mine and great Kiwi explorer, Skip Novak, a longtime sail racer and owner of the “Pelagic Australis” that sailed us to Antarctica and myself — round the southwestern edge of Enterprise Island to have a look at the art show of grounded icebergs that gather in the relatively shallow waters each summer season.
We are not disappointed. Twenty and thirty foot tall icebergs litter the alley. One has a pair of small arches carved through it by wind and waves. Another has a sheer wall, like smooth granite, rising straight out of the cold sea. Another is ridged by undulations carved into its underside over many years before it rolled onto its side.
Graham, who has kayaked the length of the Peninsula and works every season as an expedition leader aboard one of the 30+ tourist ships that come south each season, is almost apologetic for the rain and gray. “It’s so unusual these days to see so many back to back days without sun. We’ve gotten spoiled by weeks recently where there’s been nothing but blue sky and glassy seas.”
Skip, who first sailed to Antarctica in the early 1980s and is one of a small handful of charter boat captains whose boats have returned each season since, agrees. “But even when you say that, I think back to conditions twenty years ago when we had far more wind. And back then, every morning you’d wake up to snow on the boat, which we almost never see now. It’s simply too warm to snow.”
Perhaps the most beautiful part of Antarctica, even on a gray, misty day, is just how much it changes from year to year. I’ve been to this corner of Enterprise more than a dozen times and the ice that surrounds it changes every 15 minutes. Sometimes by the light glancing off it or, like today, the mist that envelops it, or the wind and waves moving it up and down, from side to side, threatening to flip it onto its side.
Without question the biggest change to come to the Peninsula in my 20 years of experience down here is the weather. Today during the austral summer, November to February, each year is warmer and wetter. It’s not just my imagination: Data collected at the various science bases along this stretch of the continent detail that air and sea temperatures have risen dramatically in the past 40 years. During the summer, average temps have risen up 5 to 10 degrees F; year round, the average temps along the Peninsula, including during its long, cold, dark winters, have raised by up to 18 degrees.
The warmer conditions are relevant to us because they deliver more precipitation, i.e. rain. Our hope is that this will be a summer filled with many clear days, in large part because we’re trying to capture Antarctica in 3D … and we don’t want the audience to come away thinking the place is only gray, misty and wet.
Conditions have been making filming tricky during these early days of our exploration. A drop of snow or salty sea spray on the 18” mirror or one of two camera lenses on the Epic 3D rig means lots of stopping and starting, stopping and starting. The result is long days and lots of waiting.
But the delays are worth it. The beauty down here is that when the sun does shine it’s like watching a Disney film on hallucinogens, surrounded everywhere you look by ice in its thousands of forms.
The black volcanic sand beach carries a heavy history, of an efficient if somewhat desperate past, in evidence from the cemetery where British whalers are buried to the abandoned and rusted pumps and storage tanks that line the shore, once filled with the oil of thousands of whales killed here each during a 25 year run.
From 1904 to 1931 this bay was home to one of the Southern Ocean’s boomtowns. As many as 15 big processing boats and another 35 “catcher” boats worked this beach at one time, most from Norway and the U.K.
With a sun rare for this island south of the South Shetlands lighting up the beach we moved up and down it not with giant tools for skinning whales but giant cameras for documenting the falling down boomtown. Rusting tanks that once held whale oil, collapsed dormitories that once housed men and wooden whaleboats buried up to their gunnels by blown sand are the subject. It is rare today that a whale ventures into the caldera, but just before entering through Neptune’s Bellows a trio of humpbacks had blown in the near-distance.
One thing we know for certain is that the sun won’t last. My hope is to make a landing the next day on the exterior of the island, at a beach known as Baily Head. Though it is just around the corner from the interior of the caldera, and we could hike to it in two hours, the preference would be to land by Zodiac on its steep beach.
How steep? It typically shuts out three of four attempts … and those are in big robust, hard-bottomed Zodiacs, not the more pliable nine-footer we will use.
Dump the Zodiac as we landed here, and there goes the film, on Day 2.
It’s the confidence of my Kiwi compatriot Graham Charles, who knows the coastline of the Peninsula as well as anyone, that is our ace in the hole. Sent to scout the beach just after 7 a.m. he returned with a thumbs up — or maybe it was a shrug of the shoulders, it’s hard to tell when we’re all dressed in six layers — but his message was that right now, it was calm enough to land. The worst case was that we could land by shore and have to hike ourselves and gear to the other side to get off the island.
One, then two and three runs were made with success and during the next two hours as we assembled the 3D camera in a growing wind on the cusp of the beach, observed by several thousand chinstrap penguins, the seas rose quickly and were soon crashing onto the shore. If we’d arrived an hour later, we’d have never been able to land.
The reason to make the effort to reach Baily Head are those thousands of chinstraps that trudge up and down in a continuous file ten to twenty abreast from high in the amphitheater behind to plunge into the cold Southern Ocean for a day of feeding. They line up on the beach, assess the surf, count the sets and then — often hesitantly, sometimes with a stutter step — dive or are swept in.
Landing for them can be even trickier; from a distance you can see them coming — 40 to 100 at a time, porpoising out of the sea, headed for the beach — and then surfing, or being slammed, onto the black sand.
Leaning into the sensitive camera to keep it upright, wrapping it in space blankets and plastic sheeting to protect it from the wet, we watch the scene for several hours in the admittedly freezing wet and cold — 32 degrees with a wet blowing wind and cold spray off the ocean.
The hike with gear to the top of the 500-foot ridge in the now-grassy and muddy bowl that is home to nearly 200,000 birds was easier than we expected and after shooting atop the beautiful ridge for several more hours, by five p.m. we were clambering down the backside towards a small black sand beach.
As we hiked down, a single file line of dutiful penguins, their bellies stuffed with fish and krill, headed back to their nests, most now featuring two fuzzy gray chicks.
Ever since sailing men first proved the world was not flat they have been cursing the weather conditions at Cape Horn and the Drake Passage that lies below, separating South America from Antarctica.
Everyone from Sir Francis Drake, for whom the windy passage is named, to Captain Bligh, who fought into the winds for 100 days before giving in, turning around and sailing to Tahiti the long way, no one in their right mind has looked forward to these seas.
Pelagic / Chilean Base
I’ve crossed the Drake a couple dozen times now and include myself on the long list of those who live with a mild and constant dread of the place. Whether leaving from the southern Chilean ports of Punta Arenas or Puerto Williams, or Ushuaia in Argentina — from which most of the 30-odd tourist ships that carry visitors to the Antarctic Peninsula each austral summer leave from — in the days leading up to each of the crossings my fingers are tightly locked for many days in advance, praying for calm seas.
This time out was no different. We were set to leave aboard the 74-foot “Pelagic Australis” from a dock lined with expedition yachts on January 2 and the five-day outlook was for incredibly light winds and … calm seas. If that luck held, it looked like we’d make what we anticipated to be a three-day crossing in good time, with little turbulence.
Unfortunately our luck did not hold. Delayed waiting for an underwater housing for our 3D cameras, which never arrived and as far as I know is still stuck in customs in Buenos Aires, we finally sailed away from Ushuaia at midday on January 4 in 45 mile per hour gusts. Just minutes later they closed the port due to strong winds.
That luck — bad luck — managed to hang in for the next four days, as we were bucked by strong easterly winds pushing us far off our hoped-for course of due south to Deception Island. Instead we were forced to tack far to the east to avoid sailing directly into the wind, taking us slightly out of our way to the eastern edge of the South Shetland Islands. When we finally turned the corner around the Shetlands at King George Island, we had to lower the sails and motor face-on into a pounding wind and sea, making less than four miles an hour.
At 7 a.m. on the 8th we finally sailed into the caldera of Deception Island, wearied by a trip that had taken about 24 hours longer than it should have.
I had chartered the “Pelagic Australis” four years ago for a similar exploration; the crew this time around has some overlap: my friends and expedition partners Sean Farrell and Graham Charles were with me then, as was Skip Novak, who owns the “Pelagic.” But the camera crew has changed, to include 3D experts Ken Corben, Bob Cranston and Johnny Friday.
During the four days of bashing our way across the Drake it was easy to lose focus on why we were headed to the Antarctic Peninsula in the first place. But as a rare sun came out over Whaler’s Bay at Deception Island — lighting up the long, black volcanic sand beach that a century ago was home to one of the most efficient whaling operations the world has ever known — it was easy to put the seasick pills away, crawl out of our bunks and start pulling camera gear out of the holds below.
“Wild Antarctica 3D” is my first entry into the growing genre. The film industry, pushed by coalitions of heavyweight broadcasters and theater owners around the world, are gambling that 3D’s time has finally arrived and are demanding more and more high-level content. For me, being able to bring the Antarctic Peninsula, which I’ve been visiting the past two decades, initially into theaters in museums and science institutions all the better. I can already see penguins and icebergs jumping off the screen and into people’s laps.
Like much of my writing and filmmaking about Antarctica in recent years this film will ultimately be about Antarctica’s ice, specifically how it is changing.
Despite that the southern continent is covered in some places by nearly three miles of ice, along the Peninsula each summer for the past four decades its ice edges have been being degraded thanks to warming air and sea temperatures. Stepping onto the rare, sunshine-filled beach at Deception Island we were reminded that many things change here, and fast.
The heart of the Drake Passaage
From Ushuaia, at the very southern tip of Argentina, we can access pretty good weather forecasts looking 3-5 days ahead; our biggest concern has been the winds in the Drake Passage, notoriously one of the windiest places on earth. As we leave Ushuaia the predictions are that it won’t blow above 30 mph for the next three days, which is optimistic. In fact, it is glassy and calm when we pull away from the dock …
We are once again off for the Antarctic Peninsula, this time armed with 3D cameras.
Photo: Flip Nicklin
Production of “Wild Antarctica 3D” begins when we sail away from Ushuaia, Argentina, on New Year’s Day aboard the 74-foot sailboat “Pelagic Australis.” This new film, slated for museum and theatrical release in spring 2013, will focus on the big changes being experienced along the length of the Peninsula by its wildlife, the ocean and land as warmer seas and air temperature continue to impact its ice.
And in Antarctica, as we’ve seen many times before, it is all about the ice.
The new film is the result of a filmmaking partnership of Giant Screen Films/D3D Cinema, DQBD Films and OCEANS 8 Films. Experienced cold weather videographers and divers Ken Corben and Bob Cranston will do much of the heavy lifting — shooting both above and below sea level (29 degrees F) — as we sail along the Peninsula.
Photo: Fiona Stewart
Our first stop will be Deception Island, then onto the Gerlache Strait and Argentine Islands. Highlights will be a two-day stop at the U.S. science base at Palmer Station and a rendezvous with the “National Geographic Explorer.”
Follow our expedition at jonbowermaster.com, Facebook and Twitter.
Whenever it is, no matter the circumstances of how I’ve left this life, I’ve today decided that in my next I definitely want to return as a lost Emperor penguin, curiously stranded on a beach a couple thousand of miles from home…yet blessed with a fat bank account, tens of thousands of newfound friends, the best healthcare known to man and beast and my own hit television show.
Photo: New Zealand Department of Conservation
I’m modeling that future, of course, after the wandering Emperor dubbed “Happy Feet,” who a few weeks ago showed up on a New Zealand beach, more than 2,000 miles from his Antarctic home. The 10-month-old penguin had clearly taken a wrong turn on a Southern Ocean foraging trip. Soon after he was discovered, standing alone and shaking his head in bewilderment, it looked like curtains for the poor bird. Since swimming ashore, he’d been living on a diet of sand and driftwood, confusing it for snow, not a healthy option to his usual diet of krill.
Typically I’d be among those advising to let nature take its course, to encourage those who found him wandering on Peka Peka Beach 60 miles northwest of Wellington, to simply let the penguin fend for himself. “Let the strong survive,” etc., etc. The end, admittedly, would not a pretty picture. But in my experience, when man steps in to “aid” Mother Nature, something usually goes badly awry.
But now that I see Happy’s getting prime attention from doctors, has a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Webcam monitoring his every move that has attracted 120,000 followers, I’m thinking he may be savvier than I first thought, smart enough to have earned that all-expenses-paid, $30,000 return flight to the seventh continent. (His fans are of a particularly rabid variety. After observing the pengie in a sleep trance one Facebook fan gushed: “At 11:20 p.m., Happy Feet was sound asleep with his left flipper sticking out. Five minutes later, he pulled in his left foot and flipper and just got up!:).”
I initially tried to resist the sappy story of the errant penguin, as I do those other “fish out of water” stories that make the TV news a few times a year, ranging from lost dolphins and whales wandering far up the wrong rivers to those misguided raptors that build nests high atop skyscrapers. But when I read that Happy’s spending his days lounging on a bed of ice at the Wellington Zoo in his permanent tuxedo, his every snore, waddle and feasting-on-fish slurry observed by tens of thousands of new friends from around the globe…I’m impressed by his apparent magnetism and will to survive.
Apparently, his short-life story is inspiring some in powerful ways: A Chicago woman identifying herself as Janet compared Happy to the hero of an O. Henry short story, assigning his example as life-affirming.“I feel as long as the penguin does well, I’ll do well,” she wrote. Hundreds gathered to watch a leading gastroenterologist from Wellington Hospital perform an endoscopy on the bird to clear his stomach of some of that irritating sand and driftwood he’d wolfed down. (Worries continue, though. “He’s definitely not out of the woods yet,” cautioned a zoo spokesperson in a post-surgery news conference.)
Happy’s plight may prove a boon for other critters at the Wellington Zoo; the same spokesperson has suggested the experience has been so positive it may well consider live streaming of other animals and their medical operations.
When first discovered, by an early-morning beach wanderer, most of scientific officialdom was against intervening on his behalf, worried that if he was returned home it could be with a host of new bacteria, putting the rest of the colony at risk. Swimming back home would be impossible. “Birds get lost. It happens all the time,” Kevin McGowan at Cornell University told ABC News. “But it’s natural that when something as charismatic as a penguin shows up, people want to help.
“There’s a war between people’s good intentions and ignorance about what’s best for the animal,” said McGowan. “What we think may be a benign intervention might not be.”
Environmentalists have jumped on the bandwagon too, suggesting perhaps the Emperor’s confusion was a result of ocean acidification, climate change or the overfishing of krill.
Today Happy’s future hangs in the balance. So far, $8,000 of the $30,000 necessary to fly him back home has been raised. One potential upside, or downside dependent on how his future plays out, is that they’ve already fitted him with a microchip that will allow scientists (and fanatics?) to follow his every movement…for the rest of life. (Didn’t Jim Carrey eventually whig out during a similar fictionalized scenario?) In one critic’s words, it’s in Happy’s flippers now.
(For the rest of my dispatches go to takepart.com)
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