A handful of people have been asking me to do this for ages (almost 2 years, to be precise), and now I’m finally doing it – writing about my voyage to the Antarctic Ocean and back in 2009 (see earlier post).

I actually maintained a journal during the trip itself, which was supposed to be a ‘daily’ log so that I could capture as much detail as possible. But, as it turned out, I only managed to write once every four days or so – digressing from the original plan out of laziness, exhaustion, lack of encouragement, shortage of subjects or excess of things to do. Anyway, after being at sea for sixty odd days, I had written around 20 journal entries. They were written what I now call “green” lingo. Here I edit and refine them into 9 blog entries, that I hope are engaging and worth at least one read.

I had no choice but to include some general information about the Oceans & oceanography, but I have withheld real names of people, our exact course and specific scientific details, out of respect for my fellow passengers (and our work). What I put down here is, after all, dedicated to them.

See all published posts in this series.

In the realm of the west wind drift

Southern Ocean Series, Chapter: 4

Roaring 40’s & Furious 50’s: monotonous work, broken by a temperamental sea

The design of the ship on which we sailed was either deliberately or accidentally ingenious. Our labs, mess and common room were on the same level as the main working deck; which itself was only a few meters above the water level. This allowed for the most dramatic views of an insolent sea, while we crossed over that part of the globe where the west wind and the ACC are most powerful: the infamous 40′s and 50′s. Looking out of any of these rooms or standing outside (which we didn’t do very often), all you saw was a swell or two, which were high enough that you could see nothing beyond.  Sometimes it rained, sometimes we crossed thick fogs; but two things that were constant during the period were the clouds and the colour – the permanently overcast sky and the sea were always slate gray. We often spotted the Southern Ocean’s most famous birds, the albatrosses and petrels lazily riding on the swells. They softened the images of the violent sea with their presence and their apparent indifference to the sea state.

As if the ‘normal’ sea state wasn’t depressing enough, several times in these 10 days, we got caught in ‘bad’ weather. The winds reached howling point (which explained the term ‘roaring 40′s’), making the rain blow sideways instead of falling down, the foaming sea frequently washed over the working deck – port side to starboard, starboard to port and sometimes, it swept in from the stern. As such, the sea state in such times was classified as ‘cyclonic’. To us, this meant we were not to step out and therefore we couldn’t collect our precious samples – just when we were getting used to our sampling routine.

The other consequence of the turn in sea state was that inside the ship, anything that wasn’t nailed to the floor would either fall over, roll away and/or break. In the labs, we tied down everything we could and in some people were so enthusiastic about securing their equipments that some parts of the lab looked like a rope factory had exploded there.

This would not be the worst sea condition we would face during this trip but it lasted a long time, and I doubt we could have endured the dreariness it for much longer.

Who are these people?

Southern Ocean Series, Chapter: 3

30’s Latitude:  Impressions of fellow passengers

As things stood when we sailed out of Port Louis, I was only familiar with two other people in the entire ship – the two people from my own institute. I knew next to nothing about the other passengers on the ship – be it the Indian Scientific contingent or the Russian Officers and crew.

There were 23 Indians in all – 7 women and 16 men, which included two service engineers for all our equipment, plus the extremely hardworking deck hand, cook and cook’s assistant. I spent most of the first week trying to learn the names – particularly of the guys. Terrible as I am with names and faces – I was quiet certain that at least 4 of them were impossible to tell apart. Within a week of starting our work in full swing, I had reversed my opinion altogether. Aside from being very different from each other, the men were all amicable, gallant and a whole lot of fun!

The Russians, meanwhile, were a polite and jolly lot who mostly kept to themselves. On quiet nights, when the ship was stationary for scientific sampling, many of them would come out with their fishing poles to catch calamari (squids are friggin’ huge in this part of the world). The contest between the chief cook and the captain to see who caught more calamaris was no secret. Not surprisingly, many of them were big fans of hindi movies – and when asked who their favorite actor was, most of them would pipe “Raj Kapoor!”

The women on this ship were something of a conundrum – particularly the Indians. I’m not trying to defame my own kind, but I’ve never been with a group of more than 5 women below 30 in a confined area for such a long time without one or more of the following creep into the group dynamic – jealousy, annoyance, crankiness, touchiness, spite etc. (I myself have never shied away from any of this when the occasion called for it. No sir!) And of course, where there are girls forming cliques, the men must take sides. But, this time around, all seven of us got along ridiculously well! Any crankiness was forgotten within a day – and coming to think of it, this is probably what made the trip as breezy and memorable as it was. I remember some days further into the trip when we girls would just hole up in one of our tiny cabins watching Love Actually or some (other) sappy chick-flick and sigh away the time.

The Russian women were something else altogether. For starts, I’d never seen women crew members on ships before. On this ship, all housekeeping staff were of women. One of the stewards, Larissa was so old and so bossy, she constantly reminded me of my grandmother (except for the smoking, of course). Our work was sometimes so hectic that we would barely have time to put or cabins right and there would be piles of wet clothes just lying in a corner – messing up the carpet. Larissa didn’t find it necessary to be polite to us, in matters of cleanliness. Thankfully, her admonishments about the state of our cabins mostly went over our heads because they were in fluent Russian. I remember this one morning, though when me and El got a good telling-off. We had worked all through the very cold night and had just dumped our soaking wet Helly-Hansen suits on the sofa and crashed in bed. We awoke to Larissa vaccuming and muttering away. When she was done and we had abandoned hope of going back to sleep, she scolded us some more, in Russian, before yelling “TWO WOMENS!” in English and gesturing angrily at our cabin. I think what she meant was “I’ve never seen two women live like such big slobs before!” It was at times like this that Larissa reminded me most of my grandmother. Poor as her English was, Larissa was a big fan of Hindi movies and music. One of the guys once told me, he woke up one morning to hear Larissa vacuuming his cabin, dancing to and singing “Murr-murr-ke na dake, murr-murr-ke!”*

As we were all getting comfortable with each other and the ship, there was a fairly dramatic change taking place outside, as we inched closer to the . The sky and air that had been clear when we set out had become a dreary gray, within the first 10 days. We would frequently sail into thick fogs, which limited our visibility greatly. The winds got stronger and the air cold, but the sea was still calm, in retrospect. We spotted some of our first whales of this trip in those first 10 days, but thanks to the fog, we lost sight of them almost as soon as we they were spotted.

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 * To wake up in a Russian ship in the middle of the Antarctic Ocean, with a 70-something year old Russian woman vacuuming the floor and singing an old Raj Kapoor song – I guess things couldn’t get more random than this.

Adventure is a state of mind

Southern Ocean Series, Chapter: 2

Wind directions, projectile vomit, humungous swells and trepidation

“The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.”

That’s just Samuel Coleridge’s way of telling us that his ship was going south – and I’ve always loved it. And in our case, the sun did come up, upon our left, out of the sea.

When you travel on land, there’s a defined set of landmarks – an old, gnarled tree or an impressive chain of mountains, or geographic features to orient you. At sea, your best indicator is the rising and setting sun, and of course the stars (if you know how to read them!). The land has characters which show you the way, and assure you you’re headed in the right direction, while the sea, it would seem, has nothing. This isn’t strictly true – a seasoned sailor will tell you that all seas have character. For instance, the Arabian Sea is ‘predictable’ – with terrible winds, rain and swells during the monsoon and mirror-calm waters in the winter; while the only thing you can predict about the Bay of Bengal, is the unpredictability. The part of the world ocean that I’m writing about is the southern part of the Indian Ocean and the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean. If you accessed a map of the world, you will see that the latter is the only belt of water that goes all the way around the world, without being blocked be a landmass. It is a connecting link between the three largest oceans in the world and a constant east flowing Antarctic Circumpolar current (ACC) which helps to keep the water in all the oceans well mixed. The ACC is also known as the ‘West wind drift’, which isn’t just a romantic name either – like most other surface currents in the world, it is generated and driven directly by the constant movement of the air above it. To put it simply, winds which are strong enough and last long enough over a body of water will drag the water below with them, in that direction (such circulation is called ‘wind driven circulation’ – clever, eh?). The ACC is a strong current, driven by strong winds and neither is hindered by landmasses, which tend to make them less ‘awesome’.

So anyway, all there strong winds and strong currents build up very powerful weather phenomenon around the Antarctic continent, so much so that beyond the 40 Degree Latitude, each belt has a ‘fancy’ name – and if you’re travelling south from the equator, you pass the roaring forties, the furious fifties and the shrieking sixties, before ultimately reaching Antarctica. It was these infamous latitudes that I had unwittingly agreed to cross, in the name of science and adventure.

We weren’t at the scary part yet, though. Over our first few days, the weather was anything but fair, while we sailed south from Mauritius (at about 20 South). The winds were strong nonetheless and the swells were more ‘robust’ than what I’m used to. I got an unforgettable demonstration of the wind force on the very first day, when some of us went up to the bow of the ship, despite some not yet having strong sea legs. One member (whose identity I shall withhold) suddenly had to throw up and so he ran up to side, about 12 feet ahead of me and was vomiting in the most dignified manner possible. The wind, meanwhile was so strong that portions of the projectiles which were going into sea got blown away in the opposite direction – up, over the head of the project-er and back aft and then all over my t-shit. (I couldn’t possibly make something like this up, folks). So much for science and adventure.

That evening, one of the members (not the projectile vomiting one) wanted to go up on the monkey deck (the deck above the Wheelhouse, where the ship was steered), to set up some of his equipment – and he dragged me and one other person along – just for ‘company’. (I think he was afraid he’d slip off the stairs and fall into the sea before fun really began). This is what I wrote in my Journal about my trip to the Monkey Deck (pasted here, without editing):

Watching the vessel cut through the high swells from up top made me, for a fraction of a second think, “Ah! Excitement! This is what it’s all about, in the end – the thrill!” Only a fraction of a second though. Then the dread of what lay ahead and the longing to go back to land came sweeping back.

The sense of foreboding that we had during those first few days at sea was significant. But within the week we had started our work, in full force – and it became our primary concern to be able to work properly at all times. This took most of the dread off, I guess; and by the time the real fun began and we were really getting tossed around – we were no longer scared, just awed.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

- Mark Twain