Report 5 February - Team B on board Pelagic from Half Moon Bay to Deception

Friday 5th Feb 13.00pm

Special note:We would like to thank Clare Howes and Nathaniel Poulter from Underhill School (Kent UK) for their good luck message. We received it today via satellite.

Pelagic at Anchor. Click for full screen image.

What time is it really? We have been changing it as we like it. Yesterday we turned the clock two hours forward to make the most of the daylight. We surprised Jerry, Eric and Troy who thought they had their first full night of sleep by getting up at half past ten, though in fact it was two hours earlier. So here we are living at minus one hour g.m.t.. Perhaps we will change the clock again tonight to have a few extra drinking hours! The boys are very happy, they just found another crate of beer. This morning we left Half Moon bay to continue on our way to Deception Island.

Yesterday evening we had a very nice meeting with the argentinean navy aboard the vessel Gurruchagga. Commander Castillo and his second chief Santiago invited us for a drink and explained about their mission. They are operating as a service-vessel, giving assistance to small bases in the Antarctic, cleaning up oil spillages and helping ships in danger with for example metereologic charts.

Heather is the happiest person aboard at the moment.after trying several sea sickness pills, she eventually found the right ones. 'Since we left london I haven't felt as good as i do now', she exclaimed, hugging Jerry for giving her these magic pills.'Now I might even be at the helm on the Drake when we go back to Ushuaia', she said optimistically.

At 23.38, we are anchored in Telephone Bay, Deception Island. The last volcanic activity occurred here in 1992. Let's hope for the best!

In the coming days all of us will give short presentations on the sites we are visiting. Kirsten did the first one on Deception Island.

"Deception Island is one of the largest and most remarkable volcanic islands in the world. The name of the island comes from the fact that the people who discovered the island were rather disappointed when they found that the island was a mere perimeter of rocks around a volcanic crater filled with water. The principal rock is lava. The first person to explore the island in 1822 was the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer although other sealers had called at Deception before.

You enter the island harbour through a narrow channel called Neptunes Bellows. It is one of the safest harbours in the world, except during periods of eruptions of course. In the first decades of this century the bay was much used by whalers and sealers as a base for operations.

The British claimed the island to be theirs in 1908 and said that it was part of the Falkland Dependencies. They leased the bay until 1931 to the Norwegian whalers who operated up to twelve floating factories for the processing of the dead whales. During the Second World War, the British destroyed all coal resources and fuels on the island to prevent the Germans from taking it. There were also quarrels between the British and the Argentineans and Chileans on the question of who owned the island. After the war this problem was never resolved. The three countries now have stations on the island and all claim it is theirs. These claims are frozen by the antarctic treaty untill 2048.

There have been several volcanic eruptions in the last century. In 1920 the water in the harbour started boiling and removed all the paint from the hulls of the ships. In 1930 the harbour floor suddenly dropped 5 metres because of an earthquake. In 1967 all stations needed to be evacuated because of a large volcanic explosion in the vicinity of the Chilean base. All the people on the island were saved but according to the base reports it was a very hazardous event with snow and ice melting very, very fast and ash falling from the sky,causing darkness.
We are looking forward to tomorrow. If the weather is good and the wind not too icy, we might have a swim in one of the warm springs on the island.

Kirsten Kuipers