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THE BEARDS AND THE BIRD: (Left to right) Cosmic-ray engineer Erick Minnie, Pole Dancing author Tiara Walters, Johannes Potgieter from Stellenbosch University’s Electrical Machines Laboratory, and diesel mechanics Andrew Kietzmann and Richard Duncan as the SA Agulhas, South Africa’s polar research vessel, enters Cape Town waters on February 22. Although the seas were stormy, we relished the warmer weather and the opportunity to wear T-shirts and shorts for the first time in months
Air temperature: 18.3°C; position: 34°S 14°E; estimated distance to Cape Town: approximately 430km; estimated time of arrival: 8am, February 23, East Shed Pier, Table Bay Harbour (recorded at 8.57am, February 22)
SUNGLASSES, as somebody once put it to me, have long ceased to exist solely as a shield for the sun. A good pair of shades, she said, are the modern veil, masking our most private thoughts, which are often leaked through the eyes.
After a long, strange and mysterious voyage to the bottom of the world, there will be a lot of big emotions as the SA Agulhas docks at the East Shed Pier, Table Bay Harbour, 8am, tomorrow morning.
An expedition to Antarctica is said to change you, and you wonder how a place so big in scale and intensity can do anything but transform the way you look at the world, but of all the countries you can visit, none is quite as beautiful as the arms of a loved one.
So loved ones, please bring your arms. We’ll be wearing our shades.
TAKE A BOW: The ice-strengthened SA Agulhas has spent 32 years navigating her way through the roughest seas on the planet – the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties. One angry night her pitching and rolling sent all the glasses flying off the bar and the test tubes crashing over the lab floors. We wondered whether these seas were, quite literally, going to take the bow
Electrical engineer Ryno Jordaan and diesel mechanic Jannes Fourie take a break at RSA Bukta during a hard day’s heavy-duty offloading, January 15. Ryno and Jannes were some of the engineers and mechanics who accompanied the Challenger drivers to RSA Bukta
January 14-19 – AFTER a 340km, four-day trek across the Antarctic to pump fuel at RSA Bukta on the Dronning Maud Land coast, the five Challenger drivers from the defence force – Gerrie Grundling (Defence Force Sports Personality for 2008), Andrew Kietzman, Antonie Minnaar, Essie Esterhuizen and Coenraad Groenewald – returned safely to SANAE IV on January 17.
The 22-hour return journey was thwarted by severe whiteouts and driving snow, although the Challenger drivers – the Ice Road ‘Truckers’ of the Antarctic – managed to haul 165 000 litres of polar diesel back to base. On the long, squally road home three of the five Challengers –20-odd-ton tracked vehicles used by SANAE IV for heavy-duty cargo – stuck fast in swamps of snow several times.
Taken from the roof at SANAE IV during the Antarctic midnight, this picture reveals what the research station’s fuel bunkers look like. The bunkers have a 600 000-litre fuel capacity
A Titan Bell 212 takes off from the SA Agulhas in late December to do a recce of the bay ice, onto which cargo had to be offloaded. Bay ice may not be thinner than 1.3m if heavy-duty cargo is to be lowered onto it via the ship’s crane
SANAE IV, the South African station in Antarctica, from the air. The station was built between 1994 and 1997. It is 176m in length and was based 50m from the cliff edge to prevent snow build-up. The first three South African stations in Antarctica were all crushed by ice
then posting missives about South Africa’s 50th expedition to Antarctica from the great white continent itself seemed like a positively nuclear idea.
But, as with any awesome adventure opportunity, you tend to say yes first and then think about how you’re going to do it later.
Ice-road truckers Andrew Kietzmann and Antonie Minnaar (above left and right), both diesel mechanics from the South African National Defence Force
WELCOME TO PARADISE: Before explorers set foot on Terra Incognita in 1895, the Victorians believed that the planet’s extreme latitudes represented the edge of the Earth. Beyond that, they postulated, lay the fulminating pits of hell. Even after the Scotts and Shackletons penetrated the edge of the known world, few of their countrymen would truly grasp that Antarctica was, in fact, Eden
NOTHING IF NOT DOGGED: Hundreds of wandering albatrosses have been trailing the SA Agulhas’s wake in the hope of picking up tasty morsels from the galley. Samuel Taylor Coleridge would’ve been nothing if not impressed
