Sea kayaking in Antarctica

Home > Diaries > 2019 > 787

WE NOW continue to head out towards the open ocean. I suppose if I keep going about another 13,000 kilometres I'll reach home. Obviously that's a huge distance especially with going against the prevailing winds. Fortunately we haven't had much wind at all on this trip so far because it's often blowing enormous gales through here with it blowing around the circumpolar current. It's been quite calm with a bit of wind overnight with quite a bit of snow, but it seems to have calmed down a bit for today. That's really good because weatherwise this is probably the most hostile place you can imagine on the entire planet, so we're doing pretty well.

OK we're really getting into the ice now. We're pretty close to land but it would be very deep here in this glacial channel. This reminds me of what Fiordland would have looked like during the ice ages. I'm now getting clear of the ice having successfully gotten through that bit. The ice just moves out of the way if you hit it so long as it's not too big. I think all the ice here is glacial ice. If there are any flat sections then that would be sea ice, but that would have all melted. In areas we have been in the last few days we've had quite a lot of sea ice.

There is a seal. The ice has a lot of creatures and I've seen quite a few seals from the kayaks and also from the zodiacs as well. The ice is quite thick at the moment. You can hear the waves crashing on the shore about twenty metres away.

As you can see I'm using my Olympus tough camera. It's a bit dangerous to be using an SLR out here.

There's one of my guides Andy who is trying to film me so I'm filming him back. Andy from New Zealand having run guided kayaking in the Abel Tasman for thirteen seasons. That's an area I'm very familiar with, very beautiful and I can understand him doing thirteen seasons there. He's obviously upgraded to the Antarctic - the ultimate.

Here's our other guide Todd, but he's heading away now. I'll catch up with him later. I'm getting used to it now. So this is Todd from Canada via New Zealand. He did some time in the Abel Tasman as well. OK it looks like we're moving.

We're just passing an Adelie penguin colony, just a small one on the rocks. It looks like the weather is closing in a little bit and its going to start snowing again. I think we're pretty near to the finishing point anyway. Every time we've been out there's always been good weather. So I've been very fortunate to have gone all this far around the world and we're getting some pretty amazing weather here.