Story and photos:
Mark Corti

The polished dome of ice which was our home last night is slippery underfoot as I struggle back to my tent. A short burst of morning sun has melted it just enough to cover everything in a thin film of water, and I windmill my arms wildly as I make my way up the shallow slope, trying to avoid falling into a discoloured stream of snow algae and penguin poop.

Thanks
With huge thanks to Cath Hew (www.icebirdexpeditions.com) and her first mate Greg, as well as Antarctic guide extraordinaire Phil Wickens (www.ski-antarctica.com), ably assisted by Alex Deschênes-Philion, as well as expeditioners Kevin, Curt, Ann, Rod and Claire who made the expedition such a success.

The stunning remoteness of Antarctica

I make a mental note to write to Palm Equipment on my return:,“Dear sirs, I note that your Palm Descender kayak boot, whilst excellent on rock, is unable to be fitted with crampons. Please correct this oversight in the 2019 model.” I give up windmilling and plop down into an icy, greenish stream. When I finally totter back to my tent, I discover that the katabatic winds, which came down off the glacier while I was gone, have squashed it flat. I reflect, not for the first time, that camping in Antarctica is something of a challenge, and that I am perhaps a little under-prepared.

Only a few short weeks before, I had been sitting on my comfy sofa at home, probably in front of a roaring fire, while flicking through January’s Paddler magazine and reading about other people’s paddling trips. An advert caught my eye: Antarctic kayak expedition. Four weeks. Last-minute space available. “That looks amazing,” I thought. “I’d love to do something like that.” And I flipped the page, and carried on reading about someone else’s adventure. And if I hadn’t been between jobs, there it might have stayed – but as it happened, I could (just maybe, just possibly) take four weeks off. Trying not to think about it too hard in case I changed my mind, perhaps reassuring myself that the trip was probably full by now, and anyway they’d want someone with more experience, I pulled out my phone and wrote a quick email to the address on the advert – cath@icebirdexpeditions.com.

And just like that, I’d fallen down the rabbit hole. I’d taken the red pill. I was going kayaking in Antarctica…

Fast forward a few weeks – weeks filled mostly with Google searches like ‘best cold weather kayak hat’ interspersed with periods of panic – and I found myself in Ushuaia, stepping aboard the Icebird, an 18-metre aluminium-hulled sail boat, custom-built for work in Antarctic waters. The other expedition members were already there, and we did a quick round of handshakes and introductions before a tour of the boat – bunks, head, galley and all the rest – before a getting-to-know-you beer and some food.

As I’d expected, they were an international bunch – a couple of Aussies, a couple of Americans, a French Canadian, a couple of Brits – and again as I’d expected, all pretty well-travelled, with many interesting stories to tell. Which was lucky, as we had a few days to explore in Tierra del Fuego together, as we waited for a storm to pass in the Drake Passage. Then another storm blew up. And another… we did a bit of sailing up the Beagle Channel, took the kayaks out for a shakedown paddle to a penguin colony and made good use of the time, but we were keen to get to Antarctica. Captain Cath Hew took another look at the weather forecast, and said that if we were prepared to, ‘take a bit of weather,’ as she put it, we could leave the next morning.

Like most paddlers going on a trip, I suspect, I’d spent a lot of time planning the paddling, but hadn’t really thought too hard about the journey to the put-in. My international paddling has always tended to follow the same pattern – a flight or two, a long drive, maybe a Zodiac ride – and some amount of foreign-country faff with language barriers and customs officers and all the rest. As I unscrewed the lid of my two-litre plastic jar and vomited unhappily into it, I began to consider that this may have been an oversight. Taking a 60-foot sailboat across the legendary Drake Passage was definitely not the usual journey to the put-in.

Sea sickness

My Happy TripzTM over-the-counter travel-sickness pills, while ideal for stopping small children feeling sick on long car journeys, were simply not cutting it here in the teeth of a storm in the Southern Ocean. My fellow expeditioners, better prepared than I, were covered in a variety of Scopolamine patches and it looked as though a particularly virulent chickenpox epidemic had swept through the boat. “Try looking at the horizon,” someone urged. I did. The ‘horizon’ rapidly came closer before breaking over the side of the boat: when the wind is blowing at 40 knots and the seas are running to 6m and more, it turns out the horizon is not actually that far away. I unscrewed the jar lid again…

We were on rotation for watches – three hours on, six hours off – and by the time my second watch came around I’d scrounged some proper seasickness medication and was feeling much more chipper. The winds had picked up a little, and the Icebird was being smashed by heavy seas across the beam. She was penduluming 45° or more with every wave, and the motion inside could only be described as ‘violent’ – huge bangs and jerks as the boat crashed down and side to side, and one could only move about with exquisite care and timing, holding on with both hands at all times.

At least the stove was on gimbals, so we were able to make cups of tea to fortify ourselves through our ordeal. Outside the pilothouse, when I went to assist the crew putting a reef in the sail, it was even worse. In full waterproofs, my lifejacket tethered securely to the deck lines, I made my way to the foot of the mast. Clutching the railings for dear life with one hand as the seas foamed knee-deep over the deck and the boat yawed sickeningly beneath me, I used my remaining three hands to haul down the various ropes needed to reef in the sail. Did I mention I’m not much of a sailor?

All joking aside, it was an utterly exhilarating experience. Cath Hew is a hugely experienced captain, and her first mate has worked on boats of all sizes all his life. Despite the storms, there was never a moment when the boat was not perfectly safe and under control. And the storms were unseasonably severe – on the first crossing the mainsail ripped, the mainsheet (a half-inch Dyneema rope controlling the boom) snapped, the autopilot gave in, and the pounding of the waves was strong enough to snap a polyethylene sea kayak almost in half where it was strapped to the railings. It was quite a crossing.

Dawn was just breaking when we arrived at Enterprise Island, Antarctica, and I had the wheel. I motored slowly down the narrow channel, avoiding barely-seen growlers (a kind of small, semi-submerged iceberg), before relinquishing control to Cath for the final approach into a sheltered anchorage, mooring up to the wreck of a century-old whaling ship. Tall ice cliffs surrounded us on three sides. Imperial shags flew back and forth, bringing squid to their hungry chicks. A pair of Antarctic terns wheeled noisily overhead, their shrill cries echoing in the frozen silence. We had arrived.

Otherworldly glow

The first paddle, slowly circumnavigating Enterprise Island, was magical. Ice surrounded us, swooping in curves: blue, grey, green. The sky was leaden, and a fine sleet was falling, but the light was luminous from the snow all around, giving everything an otherworldly glow. Drops of sleet lay on the surface of the super-saturated salt water in tiny silvery globules.

Small blocks of ice were everywhere, and on the horizon a procession of icebergs drifted down the channel. Plumes from a small pod of humpbacks spread and dispersed in the distance. Closer to our boats, the relics of commercial whaling were all around – discarded coal dumps, wooden water lighters abandoned on a rocky islet. Most fascinatingly, we discovered a cache of barrels – some still containing whale oil or chunks of whale skin – which had been covered by snow since the whaling industry collapsed here in 1929. Only the relentless march of global warming had uncovered them for us, the first people to set eyes on them for almost a 100 years.

Cherry picking

We had originally planned to kayak the whole way from Enterprise Island to Vernadsky Base, some 150 nautical miles down the Antarctic Peninsula, but the storms had reduced the time available and forced a change of plans. Phil Wickens, our vastly-experienced Antarctic guide, suggested that we ‘cherry-pick’ the best bits of paddling, and return to the Icebird to sail between them. This had the added benefit that we could camp for a few days at a time before returning to our comfortable yacht for a hot shower and some proper food.

We motored to the put-in for our first multi-day paddle, but were compelled to stop a mile or two short of our objective by the increasingly-dense brash ice. We lowered the laden kayaks into the water as the Icebird held station, and then she turned her stern towards us and was gone. This, then, was proper Antarctic expeditioning: completely isolated, utterly self-sufficient. Setting off through the brash ice in a laden sea-kayak, with the rumble of calving icebergs rolling around the icy peaks surrounding us, was without a doubt the most thrilling kayaking moment of my life. I think we all huddled together a little as we set off, feeling incredibly tiny and vulnerable against the enormous backdrop of the White Continent.

We soon pushed through the brash into a narrow channel between towering peaks. Penguins raced past us, porpoising briefly out the water for breath as they returned to feed their hungry chicks, bellies full of krill and squid. After an hour or so, we could smell the pungent aroma of guano, as we approached the largest Gentoo colony on the peninsula. Thousands of chicks, nearly fledged in their late-season plumage, lined the rocky shoreline and were clamouring for their parents to feed them one last time before they were abandoned to fend for themselves. An elephant seal eyed us lazily as we passed.

I’d love to tell you that we made good speed to our objective, but there was just too much to see: penguins, fur seals, incredible ice sculptures, the huge bones of whales washed up on a beach. A herd of crabeater seals came over to investigate us, rolling and diving between the kayaks before heading deep to harvest krill and fatten up before the long winter. After the violence of the Drake Passage, the protected waters and narrow channels of the Antarctic Peninsula itself were a welcome relief, and the open crossing of Andvord Bay passed without incident, other than a curious elephant seal and some whales on the horizon. Landing spots are few and far between in Antarctica, and campsites are even scarcer.

The glaciers march right down to the water, terminating in heavily-crevassed ice cliffs sometimes hundreds of feet high. It’s too risky to approach them – enormous chunks of ice tumble unpredictably, sending sky-scraping waves towards unwary kayakers, and flinging building-sized blocks of ice in all directions. Only occasionally are there rocky beaches, and often these are just a few metres wide: big enough for a quick leg stretch and loo break, but definitely not campable. It was thus almost 18.00 by the time we arrived at our campsite – a low, icy dome of an island rising a scant few metres above the waterline. Slipping and sliding, we manhauled the heavy boats up the ice and tethered them to a deadman, before heating up some food and collapsing wearily into our tents until the morning. As you’d expect this far south, the day dawned bright and early and since the sun was peeking through the clouds, I ambitiously went for a wash and shave by the water’s edge.

A pair of penguins had clambered up onto the boats, presumably to keep their feet off the freezing ground, and observed curiously as I struggled out of my down jacket and splashed some icy water over my head and torso in an attempt to get clean. Feeling suitably invigorated, I started back to the campsite – which is where I started this article, slipping and sliding my way up to the tent…

Extra-special memories

Antarctica supplied too many extraordinary experiences for me to fit them all into a single article. Every day provided something new – a moment that, in another place, would have been a once-in-a-lifetime paddling memory. But a few extra-special memories stand out – like the morning a couple of us slipped out early from the yacht for a pre-dawn paddle, the water glassy smooth, and the bay utterly silent except for the slight plop as our paddles broke the surface.

The occasional penguin flashed by in the water underneath us, heading out to look for breakfast. Somewhere in the distance we could hear the breathy exhalation of a pair of humpbacks making their way down the channel. Fur seals were hauled out on icebergs, and they watched us unconcernedly as we slowly paddled by. Taking a leaf from their book, we also hauled out on a low tabular berg, pulling the kayaks up and sipping hot coffee from our Thermos flasks. The resident fur seal wasn’t entirely sure what to make of these strange humans with their brightly-coloured boats, rudely arriving unannounced on his iceberg and making themselves at home, but he contented himself with a few huffs and barks before settling back down to sleep.

The day we paddled down the Lemaire Channel was probably the single best day sea kayaking I’ve ever had. The water was mirror-calm, reflecting huge dark mountains – ice-shod and snow-capped – on both sides. A regular stream of penguins broke the surface, their ripples disturbing the calm. Blue-white icebergs, carved by wind and water into fantastic fluted edifices and arches, provided resting places for seals – fur, crabeater, even a leopard seal. Even the steadily-building brash ice as we made our way southwards just added to the atmosphere – the steady susurration as the hulls of our kayaks pushed through it, the occasional thump as a larger-than-usual hunk made itself felt under our paddles.

We camped above the aptly-named Iceberg Graveyard, where the current pushes bergs into a shallow channel, trapping them until they melt. There are hundreds of smallish ones here – probably no bigger than a large house, or a smallish apartment block – resting on the bottom and being eroded into ever-more-fantastic shapes. This was probably our best campsite – clean ice, a shallow slope and a gentle rocky beach to land on. It was a marked contrast to what was probably our most-memorable camping spot: at the top of an icy slope, on a relatively-clean piece of flat snow right in the heart of a bustling penguin colony.

Begging for food

The stench there was indescribable – everything was covered in reddish excreta from the barely-continent chicks, and you could smell the colony from well over a mile away – but still an amazing and unique place to pitch a tent for the night. The birds are utterly unafraid, and hungry chicks will come up and beg for food, investigating everything – tents, stoves, kayaks – in case they’re edible. As I sat on a rock eating my dehydrated dinner, a curious Gentoo chick waddled over and eyeballed me, perhaps wondering if it could get the hang of a spork, and whether it would enjoy my Chinese Noodles with Vegetable if it did. As the moon rose over the mountains, we were lulled to sleep by the clamour of the colony, feeding continuing late into the night.

That was, sadly, our final campsite. Captain Cath had generously offered to extend our trip to make up for the time lost on the stormy crossing, but we all had jobs to return to, and it was time to leave. But as we started to prepare the Icebird for the long crossing back – lashing the kayaks to the railing, stowing the Zodiac, washing the penguin poop off the bottom of our tents – I was already secretly wondering how I could come back to this captivating, spellbinding continent on the underbelly of the world.