Feeling rough in the Drake Passage

On the evening of Thursday 21st February, we finally set sail from the Falklands for the Antarctic Peninsula on the British Antarctic Survey research ship RRS James Clark Ross. We all went up onto the Monkey Deck (directly above the Bridge) as we left Stanley very excited and eager to get to the open sea. I felt immensely happy as we finally cleared the headland and started heading south knowing that this was going to be the start of a trip of a lifetime.

At first the gentle rocking of the ship did not bother me; I went down to my cabin and started doing some work on my laptop. An announcement of the ship’s intercom warned us to stow all items as there would be “considerable” movement once further out. I thought great, I can try out my “sea legs” and I though sailing in rough weather would be quite “fun”.

This opinion was drastically changed after about 20 minutes out to sea. The gentle rocking soon turned into a noticeable pitching and rolling. All romantic notions of life on the open water soon faded.

I was quietly confident that I would not be sea sick – but how wrong I was! For those of you that have been lucky enough not to have experienced this affliction let me try and describe it as best I can.

You do not actually feel like throwing up, its more like a really, really bad hangover where you have a awful headache and are so tired that you have to spend the majority of the time in bed. You become totally drained, and there is absolutely no escape.

About an hour out into the notorious Drake Passage, the roughest stretch of water in the world, I took a little comfort to see that nearly everybody was feeling the effect of the poor weather. I did not get any sleep that first night, everything begins to rattle – everything in every cupboard needs to be jammed tight or it begins to rattle.

In the early hours of Friday 22nd February we started sailing in into a force nine (severe gale on the Beaufort Scale, 10 being a storm, 12 being a hurricane). The captain closed the outside decks as waves began crashing over the front of the ship.

Every time we hit a really big wave the whole ship would vibrate and noticeably slow down and spray would pour against the window of the bar two whole decks up. There was a large swell present too, due to the very strong currents in the area. Occasionally water would crash up against my cabin port hole as the ship would be hit side on. This violent rolling is the worst and enough to ware down the toughest of sailors.

Worryingly, all the furniture in my cabin (chairs, tables etc) began flying around from one side to the other. Eventually, I managed to jam my table upside down with a chair against the wall. The simplest of tasks becomes incredibly challenging in these conditions. When eating you have to spread your legs apart and use one hand to hold onto the underside of the table to stop yourself tipping over.

In the lab we tie our chairs to the work bench to stop them tipping over and use straps to hold all the computers down. When having a shower you have to place your feet firmly against two sides of the shower and jam yourself into the corner so as not to slide across the bathroom.

At night I place my survival suit and life jacket, which are very bulky, under one side of my mattress so I am pressed in against the wall to stop me from sliding about so much. It seems to work, as I can now sleep through most weather. When the weather is this bad you just have to lie in your bunk and hope it will not get any worse.

I still have shifts where I need to man computers, which are constantly collecting data. The work I am involved in is primarily mapping out the sea floor using swath bathymetry and sub-bottom profiler data. This needs to be manned 24-hours a day.

Every hour we also note down sea surface temperature, salinity, and track our progress on various charts. In a few hours we will be attempting to recover our first sediment core from the sea bed, which I will hopefully be involved in.

Today is calmer and I feel good. I think I have just about got my sea legs after a baptism of fire. I am eagerly scanning the horizon for the first icebergs.

This truly is going to be the trip of a lifetime.

Benedict Reinardy, 27, from Aberdeen, is a marine geologist, currently in the third year of his PhD. He obtained a BSc Hons in Geography at St Andrews University and an MSc in Quaternary Science at Royal Holloway, University of London before coming to join the Swansea University Glaciology Group in the School of Environment and Society. Benedict’s research involves the analysis of the detailed glacial record within marine sediments around the Antarctic Peninsula. His data will contribute to research into whether the past changes within the Antarctic ice sheet can be used as modern analogues for the changes that are currently being observed.

Photo of the James Clark Ross courtesy of the British Antarctic Survey.