The whaler's wreck at Enterprise Island.

Report 7 February - Team B on board Pelagic Towards Enterprise Island

Sun 7th feb 20.35

Today we have a special hello for Daniel Humphreys of Mrs.Benjamins class at Pilgrims Way county primary school Canterbury. Dad is doing fine.

Enterprise island. We are moored on to an old whaler's wreck in a little bay surrounded by icebergs. Loads of Antarctic Terns, snow white turtle dove-like birds, are flying around, screaming as if we are not wanted here. When they are breeding, they would attack us. They may be small but they are extremely courageous.

At the moment Eric, Jerry, Kate and Hamish are getting water from a glacier waterfall, some of the purest water on earth. Without it we might not have enough water to get us home decently. We use it for drinking, cooking and brushing our teeth. On the tape there is choral music. Hamish likes order so he plays this music every Sunday to remind himself and us of the fact that it is Sunday.

We had a wonderful day getting here. We left deception island very early. We had planned to leave a bit later, but the depth alarm went off at 4.15am and woke Hamish and Adrian. The changing wind had moved the boat to a place of less than 5 metres depth. They decided to leave at once. During the morning and the afternoon we had a good wind but towards the evening it fell totally silent and it started snowing. There was fog and mist and we couldn't see further than 200 metres. On our left and right large pieces of ice in beautiful shades of blue loomed out of the mist. There was an eerie atmosphere, and it felt as if we were the last people on earth. Eric was at the helm and he got the feeling as if he was sailing through a dream. The whole picture seemed so unreal.

We passed several icebergs that looked as if they had been sculpted by someone, but it must have been done by the lord himself, because so far we haven't see any penguins carrying chisels! There was an iceberg that carried dozens of penguins, who gave us a magnificent diving show. We felt a bit like tourists running around for our camera's to get a good shot of our first inhabited iceberg.

It is a relief for us all to get into the Antarctic proper, deep down it's what we have all longed to see. After the rubbish of King George island and the moon scape of Deception Island we are now beginning to sense a splendid isolation. but now we hear from the deck above that a little yacht has just pootled into the bay and is mooring alongside us at the wreck.the owner,a frenchman,turns out to be a friend of hamish.this kind of invasion we are happy to receive.

Special note for Peter Barham from Bristol University :the penguin-project troy is working on is going very well. This project is aimed at finding the best method to tag penguins - without doing them any harm- to find out more about their way of life.

The group is gelling quite nicely now and the British aboard are teaching the Dutch additional englis; this is not necessarily all the queen's english. However, there is not much progress in the learning of Dutch by the British. 'Ongelooflijk'(unbelievable) and 'goede morgen' (good morning) are about the only words they can grasp so far. Maar we blijven eraan werken. De britten hebben weliswaar de halve wereld ontdekt, maar van talenknobbels geen spoor.

Kirsten Kuipers