LAND OF THE BIRDS

SKIP NOVAK DESCRIBES THE PERILS, CHALLENGES AND JOYS OF A CRITICAL EXPEDITION VOAYGE TO SURVEY SOUTH GEORGIA'S ENDANGERED WANDERING ALBATROSS

The mood on the Vinson of Antarctica was a wee bit on edge. Justino was staring into the radar in the pilothouse and Dion was all eyes on deck in a sharpish south-west wind. The flat light of a late evening on the wild coast of South Georgia was slowly fading.

"She's coming up!" Justino shouted to us up on deck. He was in no doubt we had to up anchor - and fast. Tor, our Rambo, who was already kitted up and on standby, ran forward for the windlass. I was closest to the wheel and we started to motor ahead on our 80m of chain, closing the distance to the berg even faster.

It was an agonising five minutes and a race against time as we just snatched the anchor off the bottom, at the same time pulling hard to starboard to miss a broadside and then hard to port so the stern would clear - just. The bergy bit slid to leeward, marching on unchallenged, a truly unstoppable force of nature eventually grounding in 10m of water behind us.

We have taken knocks with ice many times over the decades and it is part of the game in the far south. What can't happen, though, is having an errant berg or bergy bit overrun and/or ground on your anchor and chain. That is a full blown fiasco. It's 'lose your anchor time' at best and hopefully not all of your chain - have an angle grinder charged up to hand. And be ready to slip the whole shooting match if need be. I have some experience - and a souvenir in my back garden in Hamble: a CQR from the Pelagic days pressed flat as a pancake.

Earlier that morning on Vinson of Antarctica we'd threaded our way through a wall of crystalline icebergs hard by the coast. Some years there is only the odd berg along the coast, but this was a bumper crop, spawned from a major calving of shelf ice in the Weddell Sea.