Today we
had the first experience of what is living in the Antarctic. We landed at
Orcadas, the Argentine station at Laurie Island, in the South Orkney Islands.
We were welcomed at the beach by the base commander and his staff, being the
third ship in the season that called on the island. Eleven months had elapsed
since they left Argentina and the relief boat is still two months away…
The South
Orkney Islands, due to their position at the northern limit of the Weddell Sea,
are famous for their difficult ice conditions. They were experienced by the
sealers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the Scottish explorers
that established the first station on the archipelago in 1903 and by the
whalers that attempted to earn their living on the islands during the first
decades of the twentieth century. Today the ice has been gentle to us.
Orcadas is
a kind of living museum. The remains of Omond House, built by the Scottish in
1903, are still visible. So is Moneta house, the first Argentine building at
Orcadas, completely restored and named after the first Latin base commander in
1905. The station of the 1930s is nowadays a sort of emergency hut, the
magnetic observatories of the 1950s are still in use and what remains of the building
burnt in the late seventies will in the near future be converted into
laboratories and sleeping rooms for scientists to improve the capacity of the
red painted modular living quarters of 1980.
Some Chinstrap,
Gentoo and Adelie penguins showed up at the landing beach and a crab eater seal
and three leopard seals were resting on the big ice floes that chocked North
Bay. And as far as animals go, that was it. The Argentines told us that this
year the winter had been long and all the biological cycles in the area are
delayed.
We left
Orcadas under heavy snowfall and we headed towards Elephant Island, sailing the
Weddell Sea waters along the southern shores of Coronation and Signy islands. Weather
permitting, tomorrow we will reach Point Wild. After all, we are in the
Shackleton Christmas adventure…
