Visit from the NBP

In mid-November, a rare thing happened at Palmer. The Lawrence M. Gould (LMG) is our usual supply ship and the one that brought us down here in October. But the program also leases an even larger vessel, the Nathaniel B. Palmer (NBP) that typically traverses the peninsula with scientists whose projects require that they be on boats rather than using Palmer as a land base.

I posted a picture of both the vessels docked in a row on the pier at Punta Arenas when I was first coming down here. But it's been almost 20 years since they were both at Palmer at the same time. But due to the need to drop a couple of scientists off at Palmer at a time when the LMG happened to be here, we got a dual LMG/NBP visit. It was pretty cool to see.

The ships tied up to each other and put down a gangway between the two that we could cross to take tours of the NBP.

It's only a few dozen feet longer than the LMG, but it feels SO much bigger, and is definitely taller, so that it gave a really nice novel view of Hero Inlet.

 I guess I'm just really not great at staying in one place for a very long time, because it even felt jarring and amazing to me to look out at the same view that we can see from Palmer, but just be a little bit higher and out in the water than we are usually. At the time I had only been at Palmer for about six weeks, but it had been such a crazy six weeks it had felt MUCH longer, and even the smallest change in perspective at that point was very, very welcome!

Straits of Magellan and the Drake Passage

There are certain places on this planet that, as my younger self read and learned about the world from books, sounded just unbelievably exotic to me and are now a particular thrill to experience in person. I felt like that when I went to Borneo last year, and I felt that way again as the LMG began its pass through the Straits of Magellan and passed Cape Horn. I mean, come on: the freaking STRAITS OF MAGELLAN! This is some legendary age-of-exploration stuff here. And I was there! As the radar of the ship's location showed (the southern tip of South America on the left and Isla de los Estados on the right)...

...and then I went up on deck to experience first hand. That's the sun setting over Cape Horn behind me...

...and Isla de los Estados glowing in that setting sun on the other side of the ship.

Total peace and beauty.

I'm glad I appreciated it for everything it was worth, because already the waters were getting rockier, and the next couple days were something else. I was on so many sea-sickness meds and was so out of it from that and the constant movement that honestly the whole thing was a total blur. But here's a little bit of what it was like to go through the Drake.

At one point I walked into the galley as one of the first really big swells tossed us, and several bowls of fruit that had been on shelves above the tables all went soaring across the room and the fruit landed and started rolling everywhere. One of the ship's crew came in right behind me and I regret not having stopped to take a video of us trying to pick up all the fruit. Every time we would reach out for an apple or orange, the ship would roll and it would dart away from our hands. It took forever to clean up. I can tell you definitively, though, that prescription anti-nausea meds for sea-sickness (despite giving you terrible dry mouth and dilating your eyes so you can't see anything up close and making you too tired to focus on much of anything) WORK, even if they make you feel like a zombie.

The upper decks of the ship were closed while we were rocking and rolling through the worst of it--too much danger of someone getting tossed overboard, which would have been a death sentence. We did manage, though, to complete a Drake Passage survey--one of the science projects that happens on the LMG: every hour or so, we released sensors into the water that recorded temperature as they sank, plus we did water samples several times/day. There were multiple shifts of volunteers, so I signed up to help with that and am glad I did. That was a good excuse to get a couple breaths of fresh air and a legit reason for being briefly on deck as we held on tight for science!

Other than that, I just slept as much as I could through the worst of the Drake, which was certainly not even as bad as it could have been! I wish I had more pictures of it, but I was too out of it to be able to think about how to record the experience.

Aboard the Lawrence M. Gould

The LMG is the smaller of the two icebreakers the US Antarctic program leases for its marine operations around Antarctica. (The larger--the Nathaniel B. Palmer (aka the NBP)--is too large to dock at Palmer; to remedy that and make Palmer access more flexible, all science will pause at Palmer the summer of 2021-22 for the build-out of a new pier that can host the NBP.)

But in the meantime, only the LMG can take passengers to Palmer. Once I got to know it, it felt like a cozy-enough ship. It has a lounge...

...and of course a galley...

...and a bunch of cute staterooms, each with a bathroom.

The problem, for me, was that there were more of us (the ship crew, the Palmer summer station support crew, and two scientists coming down early) than there were stateroom spaces. And the way they increase passenger capacity is by creating berthing in the cargo hold, in shipping containers outfitted with bunk beds.

Since I was one of the few support staff on the ship who had never been to Palmer, my lowly status earned me a bunk in the cargo hold, along with the two female scientists. It was clear to me everyone else knew what a miserable situation this was going to be, because people in the staterooms kept telling me that being in the hold is actually great because it's a smoother ride through the Drake (the rocking of the boat being less intense on lower decks of the boat). But I couldn't help but notice that none of the people who were in staterooms chose to relocate to the open bunks in the cargo hold. And there was a reason for that. It was miserable. The station manager tried to help the three of us in this container out by giving us a container with a bathroom, so that we didn't have to climb the stairs up to the main deck every time we needed to pee. But that ended up backfiring because the plumbing in the bathroom didn't work and it ended up leaking all over and stinking up the container the whole trip. Plus the sound of the ship's engines was incredibly loud down in the cargo hold, we did end up having to climb the dangerous staircase up to the main deck every time we needed to pee (a seriously precarious task while we were rocking and rolling our way through the Drake, so that it felt safer to just stay on the upper decks as much as possible, negating any potential benefit of having a "room" on a lower deck), there was so little space in the container that if one person needed to walk through, the others had to get into their bunks to let her pass, and all we had to hold our stuff was a gym locker each.

But, that was just how it was for the nine nights we spent living on the LMG (the last night of our time in Punta Arenas, the five nights at sea--rather than three because of a late departure and a rough passage across the Drake--and three more nights once we arrived at Palmer). One of those things about Antarctic adventures you just have to suck up!

I was finally starting to get to know my way around the ship as we navigated along Tierra del Fuego (if you have really good eyes or can expand this picture, you can see our route starting in yellow and then turning red)...

...and kept wary eyes on the weather forecast for the Drake passage. The downward-pointing beige bit coming from the top of the frame in the picture below is southern South America, the little bit of beige coming up from the bottom of the frame is the peninsula of Antarctica, the space between them is the Drake Passage, and the color red is bad news!

And so we braced ourselves for an "extra adventure-y" voyage south!