The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,25
disappeared inside the ship. I was left alone in the approaching dusk. I stayed there until Hobart was long gone and the Aurora hummed smoothly through the quiet waters of the Derwent then down the eastern side of Bruny Island. The sadness of departure was tempered by the anticipation of new experiences, and I was filled with guilty excitement.
Beyond the tip of Bruny, we churned through the peaks and troughs of the Southern Ocean. The motion plastered me to my bunk. Occasionally, I braved the deck, watching the heaving waters stretching south, and trying to catch a glimpse of an albatross riding the updrafts around the ship. The birdwatchers on the ship showed me lists of seabirds: cape petrels, prions, royal albatross, black-browed albatross, wanderers, light-mantled sooties. But I was too ill to spend long out of bed. I’d snatch a brief gasp of frigid air, then stumble below and collapse on my bunk.
On rough days, the sea sloshed at my porthole like a washing machine. My cabin mate told of cups rolling off dinner tables, of the swell riding up onto the trawl deck at the back of the ship, of someone vomiting on the bridge. Dinners were bowls of pasta with rich creamy sauces, lobster thermidor, lasagne, steaks. But my meals consisted of dry biscuits chewed gingerly in my bunk. Only horizontal did I feel vaguely normal. I lay there fighting seasickness, waiting to acclimatise so I could sit up for long enough to write home to Debbie.
It took four days to find my sea legs. I was like a bear emerging from hibernation—slow at first, then grasping life with increasing energy. The bridge became my home. During the day, I helped with seabird counts, watching petrels and albatross riding the icy winds as they followed the ship. When I wasn’t on the bridge, I was down on the trawl deck where the albatross dipped low over the water, skimming the surface of the waves. Down there, I saw krill swarms kicked up in the ship’s wake, and seabirds diving to feast on them.
While others worked out in the weights room in the bowels of the ship or raised a sweat pummelling a boxing bag, I jumped rope out on the trawl deck, finding some sort of lurching rhythm as the ship rose and fell with the waves, my breath rising in clouds of vapour. Some passengers did nothing beyond eating and sleeping and watching videos in the gloom of the lounge.
On Saturday nights, I braved the throng down in the bar, discovering another aspect of ship life. After the mess, the bar was the place for meeting people. The Aurora is a dry ship these days, but back then people survived for their beer rations. Our trip was a new adventure for many, but there were also lots of returnees, who talked endlessly of people I didn’t know and previous Antarctic expeditions. It was hard to fit into the crowd. While everyone else socialised and drank too much beer, I sat and observed the behaviour evolving among the passengers. Liaisons were budding everywhere; you’d have thought everyone was unattached, but many had relationships at home.
While all this was happening, the ship steamed south, churning through the roaring forties and the furious fifties into the screaming sixties. At times, we pushed into fog with black and white Antarctic petrels fading in and out, still following the ship.
A week in there came a new sound, a swishing against the side of the ship. And now the ship rolled more slowly, almost lazily. Out the porthole, pancake ice stretched to the grey horizon in neat rounded plates with crusty upturned edges. From the deck, I squinted into brightness, watching the swell running slowly through the shuffling horde of frosted discs. In the space of a day the world had transformed. The pancakes became larger cakes and then ice floes, and we were into the pack ice.
Wherever possible, the ship followed dark open tracts of water called leads. But as the floes thickened we began to break ice. Down on the fo’c’sle I hung over the railing, watching the ship ride up, feeling the tremors in its metal hulk as bits of ice grazed, split and tumbled under the bow. Occasional deep judders jarred the decks as the propeller carved chunks of ice with a jerk and a shake. There was eerie booming followed by groaning and creaking as the ship cracked floes with her weight.