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Our Far South: Land at last!
After 6 days at sea, we finally sighted land, Franklin Island, with it’s glacial snow cap looked like Eden after the roller coaster ride of the Ross Sea. Franklin Island is home to a large colony of...
View ArticleOur Far South: from shipwrecks to high seas
I awoke to find that the boat had moved over night to the bottom end of the Auckland Islands, into Carnley harbour, with Adams island to our south. Adams island is home to Gibson’s wandering albatross...
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Our Far South: What it boils down to
We arrived at Macquarie Island – the sheltered waters in the lee of the island provided a welcome relief from the open ocean we had crossed between here and the Auckland Islands. The cool subantarctic...
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Our Far South: Roaring Forties, furious fifties and Screaming sixties…
Heading south from Macquarie Island we have had some relatively calm seas, pretty remarkable for this part of the world. Leaving the Roaring Forties which gave us a pretty slow rolling sea the fifties...
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Our Far South: Ross Sea adventure playground for Petrel heads.
As we entered the Ross Sea we lef the band of large ice bergs behind us, and entered a fairly calm Ross sea. I kept a morning vigil on the bridge looking for whales. it was not until mid afternoon that...
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Our Far South: McMurdo Sound
Scott Base, as South as we go: In a place where the sun sets at 12.30 and rises at 2.30 sights just get more and more incredible. At 1am the sea around the boat started to freeze, the water became...
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Our Far South: a tale of two huts
Not Lower and Upper Hutt, but instead the story of two attempts at the pole. That of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the voyage of the Nimrod, and Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Terra Nova expedition....
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Our far South: all at sea
In the early hours of the 25th, we were awoken and called to the bridge to see the biggest wall of ice that I will probably ever see. The Ross Ice Shelf, and enormous slab faced Ice sheet stretching...
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Our Far South: Campbell Island – the return
Our first sight of land since Antarctica in the dim small hours of the 3rd of March was Campbell Island. Campbell Island is home to more species of albatross than anywhere else in the New Zealand...
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Our far South – Antipodes and Bounty Islands: dots of importance
I awoke on the morning of 6 March to discover that we had very rapid progress over night and were approaching the rugged columnular basalt cliffs of the Antipodes Island, crowned with green tussocks....
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World’s rarest whale revealed to the world.
Even in this well-informed age it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about the natural world – especially the oceans! All whales must come to the surface to breathe, despite this the...
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Collecting the Spade-toothed whales
The Spade-toothed whale Mesoplodon traversii, is now known from 5 specimens, three of which are housed at Te Papa. With only one of these specimens a complete skeleton, the species is as rare as they...
View ArticleOur Far South: The Snares
After leaving the port of Bluff, we took our sunset cruise down past Stewart Island on towards the Snares, our first port of call in Our Far South. The first marine mammal spotting of the trip was a...
View ArticleOur far South: Return to Enderby
I visited Enderby in 1995 as part of the DOC Sealion project. The project is still going today. Sadly the most noticeable thing on my return was the much smaller numbers of sealions and pups. It is...
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