Peter Kinsella's Antarctic Voyage Diary
Sunday 28th January, Terra Nova Bay ( 74° 41.1' S 164° 27.0' E )
Yesterday ,Tim and I got sunburnt eyes. I had my eyes fixed by Rose , who was a Scottish nurse I think. She put used cold tea bags onto my eyes!!! It seemed to work.
Today we were approaching Terra Nova Bay with Cape Washington ahead and Mt. Melbourne to starboard. All were found by Captain Ross in 1841. There was not a cloud in the sky, no wind and very strong sunlight, still 24 hours a day. We ran through several pods of killer whales at 0800 hours off Cape Washington. So we stopped to photograph them and then cruised along the outer edge of the fast ice shelf towards Terra Nova Base. The captain placed the ship into the fast ice shelf as a method of anchoring and we had sight seeing flights in the ship’s two helicopters. It was really very exciting flying around the ship and up the ice canyon of the Campbell Glacier tongue. The views of Mount Melbourne were fantastic and clearly visible (apparently another first).
The Kapitan Khlebnikov
parked in the ice in the Terra Nova Bay area
As they say, the weather gods continued to co-operate with us so in the afternoon we visited the friendly Italians at Terra Nova station where there were 96 personnel on site. They asked our captain to break up the fast ice blocking the entrance to their jetty. This was a very interesting operation as the icebreaker effortlessly ploughed in towards their jetty and in the space of 20 minutes had broken and moved about 500,000 tonnes of ice. The Italians are only there for the summer three months and were due to leave there by March 15th. Four of us had a "special tour" with the station master as one of our Melbourne guys knew him. We visited the airstrip situated on the sea ice in a nearby bay. They have two flights in during the summer (weather permitting). Under International Airport regulations they were required to have a fire brigade which consisted of a huge "foam" truck and two smaller fire trucks. They also had three ambulances. It was really interesting and surprising to learn that the this base was the only base in the area to have a small, but effective sewerage treatment works. The evening (still 24 hour daylight) saw us heading towards the Drygalski ice tongue. This is the tail end of a glacier floating on the sea with a front 65 kilometres long and total depth of ice about 150 metres.
To head further south we had to do some weaving in and out of ice flows and some ice breaking. The ship was awesome whilst ice breaking the thinner ice up to 2 meters thick. It just steams into the pack ice at 15 knots and cracks and shatters and carves a track through, throwing ice everywhere and spitting macerated ice out the stern. The ship is a diesel electric and can steam quite fast in reverse as well whilst breaking ice. We had some night-caps around 2330 hours and went to bed about 0200 hours.