A Southern Christmas 2001 - Day 2 (At sea en-route to the ice)

If you are reading this for the first time and didn't read yesterday's post - Stop! Kindly go back (HERE) and read my introduction and journal entry for Day 1 and then, of course - please come back.

Today's entry was quite short - they get longer as the trip progresses, but not too long, I hope!

 Monday 17th December 2001

At sea

Today a few of us got to understand why Aurora Australis is sometimes unkindly called the “Orange Roughie.” Personally, I was pleased to discover that although it is more than 25 years since my sea-going days, I still seem to have immunity from sea sickness. Sadly, not all my shipmates are as fortunate and there was only a handful of us who turned up at 0730 for breakfast. My colleague and cabin mate, Yann from our waste research establishment in Paris, was one of the casualties with a ruthless case of mal de mer which saw him incapacitated until later that afternoon.  I’m pleased to say that after a couple of pills and a good sleep he joined us all for dinner that evening and was soon feeling and looking much more like his earlier self.

 We are presently about 200 nautical miles southwest of Hobart and travelling at a cracking 16.5 knots having picked up speed the past couple of hours to take advantage of the relatively calm sea. Earlier today the swells were around four to five metres with the ship occasionally pitching dramatically. Later this afternoon it calmed down and the decision was taken to put our foot down a bit to make a little hay while the sun shines, so to speak. If we can keep up this speed, we may well make Casey by December 23.

Today was a day for finding our sea-legs. It was also a good day for establishing communications so Yann and I can keep in touch with Sydney and Paris, and we now have our own satellite antenna sticking out on the deck above the wheelhouse at the end of a broom handle – it works perfectly.

Voyage Leader Greg was one of the early sea-sick casualties, but he was still able to join us from his sick bed later this evening to inform us that we are in for some intense survival training activities over the next few days – something we can all look forward to!

We are also running an Ice Sweep, the object being who of us can most closely predict when we will see our first iceberg. The rules are strict, it must not be a radar siting it must be visual and independently verified, and it must be at least as big as the ship, more on this story later.

To be continued… 

A Southern Christmas 2001 - Day 1 (Setting off from Hobart)

 

Something to read over Christmas

(sort of)

Twenty-three years ago this week I set off on an adventure.

It was a selfish act, abandoning my family in the heat of a Sydney Christmas with the impending threat of bushfires, but it was an opportunity of a lifetime and my wonderful wife, Pauline convinced me that there would be more Christmases ahead, but there was unlikely to be another chance like this.

So where was I going? The Galapagos? The Amazon? The Moon?

No, this was to Antarctica – by sea, as a temporary expeditioner with Australian Antarctic Division.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I want to jump back to that time and share the experience again. I hope you’ll stick with it.

It began with a sizeable contribution to a clean-up program by the parent company of the business I was employed by at that time. The issues and actions which took place then, are as relevant today as they ever were.

At that time, I was working as Development Manager with what was then, and still is - one of Australia’s leading environmental services companies. The company had been operating as a waste transport business for over twenty years before being acquired by French services group, Veolia in the early 1990s. The people in Paris had become aware of a report, which had been prepared the previous year by one of my colleagues in Tasmania following a waste audit carried out at Casey Base for the Australian Antarctic Division.

That same year, consistent with their sustainability values, Veolia made a global commitment to sponsoring waste clean-up in Antarctica and were already working with agencies in Antarctic Treaty countries including Argentina, Russia, France and the UK.

As a result of a determined initiative by Veolia’s long-standing head of the Australian operation, Doug Dean, this translated into a $2 million offer to construct specialised waste containers to assist in a clean-up being planned by the Australian Government over the next ten years.

The offer was willingly accepted by then Federal Environment Minister, Sen. Robert Hill, and it wasn’t long before we were working closely with the Division to build the 240 containers which would travel on board Aurora Australis to Casey Base at the end of 2001.

An exciting outcome of this from a personal view was that I was to travel to Antarctica with the first shipment on a three-week round trip over the Christmas and New Year period. As it transpired, the adventure lasted almost seven weeks for reasons which will become clear over the course of this story.

I kept a journal during this time and what follows is a summary of the trip. I confess that reading it again it seems a little pretentious in parts, but I have tried not to change it too much, only removing repetition and trivia to make the story less longwinded. I hope it provides a hint of this unforgettable experience.

I’m not going to post it all at once – I’m fully aware of the TLDR risks associated with such communications.  The adventure (and it truly was an adventure) began 23 years ago this week on 16 December 2001, and my plan is to post each day’s journal entry on the anniversary of the day the events took place.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do recalling the events so many years later.

MISSION ANTARCTIC: WASTE REMOVAL – AN ANTARCTIC DIARY

Sunday 16th December 2001

On board “Aurora Australis”.

Yann and I checked out of our Hobart hotel at 0730 and headed down to Macquarie Wharf with our gear. There, with 38 of our fellow travellers we assembled in the main dining room for the briefing of voyagers and expeditioners. They are an interesting group and I’m looking forward to getting to know them over the next three weeks.

Our party includes a dozen or so “over-winterers” heading south for the next 14 months. This includes some of the people who are going to be filling our bins with the waste from the old Thala Valley tip. Their voyage T-shirts say, “CASEY 2002 – The Rubbish Run”.

The briefing was thorough and started with welcome speeches by Greg, the Voyage Leader and Tony, Director of the Australian Antarctic Division. We learned something about the purpose of this trip (essentially re-supply) and what some of our fellow travellers would be doing on the voyage, and when we arrived at our destination. It was a great introduction to what was in store for us.

If we had the slightest impression that the Antarctic is not an exciting and potentially dangerous place, it was quickly dispelled by AAD’s Chief Medical Officer who gave one of the most graphic and entertaining presentations of what to do and what not to do to survive the Antarctic.

Because some of our expeditioners are going to winter in Antarctica and will be away from home for over a year, there was a focus on some of the personal as well as physical risks which will be faced – and as someone who had in a previous life spent many months at sea, I could understand his comments about not focusing on the way the fellow across the table eats his food or scratches his beard which, when looked at day after day for months on end, can drive a person to distraction without the right attitude.

Later the ship’s master, Tony gave us a briefing on the Aurora itself. She has five decks – A, B, C, D, E and F, from which we will forever remember the mnemonic, action, bosses, crew, dongas, eating and fun. Yann and I are sharing a donga on D deck which is where most of the group are located.

We had been scheduled to leave at 5 pm, but due to some last-minute technical changes this was revised to 8 pm. It’s a major event when an Antarctic Division ship leaves on a voyage south, and this departure was no exception. Although a relatively small group of 40 expeditioners and 21 crew, there was nevertheless a healthy contingent of well-wishers, loved ones and old hands on the wharf to wave us off. The obligatory streamers were strung out between ship and shore and on the dot of 8 pm Aurora gave a long blast, and we slowly moved away from the wharf and into the Derwent.

As the distance between our vessel and the wharf grew larger, the streamers separated one by one, and cameras and videos were replaced by mobile phones. We all congregated on the helicopter deck, in the lee of our deck cargo of waste bins, using our phones for the last time for a few weeks. As we sailed down the Derwent past the township of Kingston, headlights of a car on Bonnet Hill could be seen flashing as a determined spouse sent his or her last bon voyage to one of our number.

By 9 pm, we were heading out into open sea and the first gentle swells began to cause the ship to gently pitch in the fading light. We all gathered in the Dining Room for a final briefing. Here we learnt that we are due to arrive in Casey on Christmas Day and that Santa had agreed to make an early visit to the Aurora on December 22. We learnt that there were to be a few more things to look forward to, although our Voyage Leader Greg told us he’s going to leave us in peace tomorrow as we get used to the feel of a moving deck under our feet.

To be continued…

 

Michael Thomas (Mick) Fleming

 As we go through this journey that we call life, and if we are one of the fortunate ones who by random act of chance was born in a society of relative security, access to health care, clean water and an education then, if our luck holds out, we get to experience all the emotions and sensations that life provides – love, happiness, sadness, joy, grief, excitement, fear, pleasure and pain.  We’re all on the same ride along the moving footpath of life and none of us know where or when it will end, just that it will – and that for some of us it’s getting uncomfortably closer. 

I realise that this is a maudlin way to start writing a few words to honour a wonderful man, only I’m reminded, as I grow older that there are quite a few more who have completed their journey than there were when I was about halfway into my own.  I have grieved and shed tears for all of them – but none more than my lovely friend, brother-in-law and great mate, Michael Thomas (Mick) Fleming. They say the difference between friends and relatives, is that you only get to choose your friends. Mick became a relative, and I in turn became a member of the Fleming family, the day Pauline and I walked down the aisle almost fifty years ago. Mick was a dear, dear friend and I miss him - he was a brother. We know that Mick’s journey with his beloved Maureen began when he joined the army after he’d had enough of the misery of working in a coal mine in 1950s Nottingham. It was in Ashford that he met a pretty 19-year-old Maid of Kent and knew at once that she was the one. They were married shortly after following his demobilisation in 1958. After a brief honeymoon by the seaside, with only enough for their fare, they took the train to Nottingham. Mick told me a tale that when a fellow traveller, noticing they hadn’t eaten throughout the journey offered them one of her sandwiches, he proudly said “Thanks very much, but we never eat when we travel". They made their home in Ashford and lived there for many years. Although when we lived in the UK, we were in a different part of the country, Mick and I became friends and though Pauline and I moved to Australia a few year later, we continued whenever we could to share time together. Apart from the times we spent at their homes in Ashford and Rugby, we shared memories in France, Cornwall and Australia. I could write many stories of the times the four of us shared – Mick, Maureen, Pauline and me. Road trips up and down the NSW coast, lunches and dinners at iconic restaurants and resorts, and lunches and dinners at cheap pubs and roadside rest stops. It was always the same – laughter, enjoyment and affection. 

Not wanting to make this story “too long, didn’t read” (TLDR), I’ll mention only three events which remain in my memory. Christmas 2002 – their first visit to Australia. A wonderful time driving from Sydney to the Gold Coast in a rented VW people carrier. Staying in a borrowed apartment overlooking the beach at Broadbeach. Swimming in the surf, followed by Christmas carols and barbecue, looking out at sand and ocean in 35-degree heat, then later, watching from a second-floor balcony, glass in hand as a summer storm tore through the area, reducing visibility to a few feet and dropping 200-300 mm of rain in less than an hour, only to be gone the next day and sunshine restored.

Easter 2005 – again in Australia. A day out sailing with Ian Kiernan. Perhaps not as well-known outside of Australia, a brief visit to Wikipedia will tell anyone interested that Ian was an Australian icon, a former Australian of the Year, round the world yachtsman and environmental campaigner who founded the “Clean up Australia” organisation and inspired millions of volunteers and supporters over many years. I was fortunate to have known Ian through business connections and worked with him for a number of years until he sadly passed away in 2018. When I told Ian that Mick was coming to Sydney for a holiday, he immediately offered to spend the day with us on Sydney Harbour in his classic fifty-year-old yawl “Maris” – the same yacht in which he completed four or five Sydney to Hobart races. She was then, and still is now a wonderful sight sailing on the beautiful harbour. It was a truly delightful day. Ian brought along a picnic lunch and a couple of cold beers, and we could not have picked a better way to spend our time.  Later that afternoon, Ian presented Mick with an inscribed copy of his autobiography, “Coming Clean”, which from that day had pride of place on Mick’s bookshelf.

December 2018 – Brisbane.  I can’t finish a story about Mick without at least one golf story. I have lost count of the many enjoyable (but fiercely competitive) rounds of golf we played together – sometimes just the two of us, and on other occasions with Paul, and once with cousin Colin - a great day out with the wives at the Briary in Birmingham. Mick taught me all I ever knew on a golf course (or so he would have anyone who happened to be in earshot believe). He was a stickler for etiquette, but really understood the value of a good sledge. “Are you sure you want to play off the blue tees, Mike? It’s a lot closer from the yellow ones you know.” 

He never wore a glove – when it was his turn to hit the ball off the tee, he would step up to the ball, spit on his hands, rub them together, grab his driver firmly and swing – and the ball would sail down the fairway – often.  If not, he would issue a round curse, and stride off after it ready for the next blast.

My favourite round, and coincidentally the last time we played together was Christmas Eve, 2018 at Victoria Park Golf Course in Brisbane, a beautifully cared for public course, close to the CBD. The course sadly closed a couple of years ago in the name of inner-city development but on that day, we walked a lovely hilly course with well cared for fairways and manicured greens.  I can’t remember who won on the day (well, I can – but it doesn’t matter). It was a close game, we had a lot of laughs, swore a lot – mostly at the ball and not each other and enjoyed an ice-cold ale in the beer garden afterwards – something to remember for ever.

I’d like to close this short homage with a few words from Terry Pratchett from his novel, Reaper Man.

"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."

Farewell, Bro!