Elephant Island
Trip Start
Feb 03, 2006
1
12
59
Trip End
May 09, 2006
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Elephant Island,
Antarctica
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Coordinates at Elephant Island:
Approximately 300 mile trip from last stop.
8:30am
Some sun, but cold (36 degrees) and very windy. The wind is so strong I could not stand on the forward deck as we approached Elephant Island. The wind would literally knock me over. Elephant Island is famous because it is the spot that Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men landed after having to abandon his trans-Antarctica expedition. He and his 28 men used a couple of rowboats to get across what I believe is at least a hundred miles of open ocean, with temperatures about as cold as I am experiencing today, and high winds. His ship, the Endurance, was crushed earlier by ice that was supposed to be breaking up for the summer season, but instead expanded around the ship, eventually crushing it and then forcing what was left of the vessel underwater to never be seen again.
Back to Elephant Island, the expedition team all made it here safely, though with quite a bit of frostbite, losing fingers, toes, and in one case both feet. Having no settlements on the island, they were forced to continue on. Shackleton left 24 men here, while he and 4 more made their way to South Georgia island, quite a distance away. They eventually made it to the whaling settlement there, and four months after they were left behind, a ship came to rescue the 24 men left on Elephant Island. Unfortunately, after a few months at peace back in England, they were almost all shipped to the front lines of World War I. That's the history lesson of the day.
Noon
The weather has forced the captain to cancel excursions to Elephant Island today. For a while in the morning, they were ferrying people over in the Zodiacs. But an hour or so into it, the winds came up, and the swells, and it became pretty dicey. In particular, the swells caused the Zodiacs to move up and down as much as six feet while trying to load from the ship platform, making it very difficult to get people on and off. I was not one of the ones who made it in the morning, so my excursion was cancelled for the day. But I've heard that on some trips down here, the weather prevents all landings. And we have had three very good ones, so missing one is not so bad. Everyone is assigned a time when they are to report to the landing, mine was later in the afternoon, and after it was determined to be unsafe to continue the excursions.
So we have left Elephant Island (the island, by the way, is not named for the elephants that inhabit it, but instead for elephant seals, which are said to abundant here, though I did not see any) and are on our way to the Falkland Islands.
Comments
Elephant Island, ice and rock
How did you get that photo? It looks like it was taken from the air (helicopter or some such). Fantastic pictoral of how the zodiacs launch.
Are you posting your GPS coordinates?
Judy from the West