In the realm of the west wind drift

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.