Estate Living Magazine Smart Moves - Issue 38 February 2019 | Page 65

G O O D
L I F E
Getting there
Deception Island was our first landfall after several days’ sailing from
Argentina across the Drake Passage and an aborted stop at Half
Moon Island, which we could not visit because of bad weather. The
erratic arrival and departure of wind and ice were a phenomenon
we would become used to as we continued our quest to discover
a tiny section of the world’s driest and coldest continent. We were
sailing on the MS Midnatsol, a 136-metre, 970-passenger cruise ship
operated by Hurtigruten, global leaders in exploration travel.
As mist billowed landwards from the water into which I had just
plunged, the ruins of the abandoned whaling station behind me
seemed shrouded from the modern world. I had never felt more
alive.
The gigantic oil tanks, bleached whaling boats and several graves
are the only things that remain as a testament to a once-prosperous
sealing and whaling base – a rather unlikely location on account
of the volcano’s unpredictable tendency to erupt when you least
expect it, as several researchers were to discover more than a
century on, in the late 1960s when their research station was
destroyed by falling ash.
A registered member of the International Association of Antarctica
Tour Operators, Hurtigruten works hard to make sure that landings
in Antarctica and associated islands have no lasting impact. So we
R
Deception Island, so named by American sealer Nathaniel Palmer
in 1820 because of its deceptive appearance as a ‘normal’ island, is
located in the South Shetland Islands just north of Antarctica. And, if
you look at a map, you may notice that the conveniently sheltered
Whalers Bay is the flooded caldera of a volcano – but what you won’t
see on a map is that it’s an active volcano, one of two in Antarctica.
Tread lightly
Deception Island
That morning, Midnatsol rounded the snow-dusted cliffs of the
caldera and began her slow and steady approach through the
narrow entrance, Neptune’s Bellows, eluding the tricky Ravn Rock,
which lies submerged just a few metres below the surface in the
middle of the channel, and which had been the undoing of many a
ship that met its untimely demise in these frigid waters.