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26^th Feb

Hi everyone, its late on Saturday night and I am wide awake, having slept all afternoon. I made the mistake of laying on my bed after lunch, and this ship, it rocks you like a baby. I didn’t wake up until dinner time, 5.30. This morning we had our first muster, or fire drill, where we had to put on all our polar clothing and life jackets and go to the helideck, the big space at the back ( stern? ) of the ship. Everything on the ship has a different name; the floor is the deck and the walls are the bulkheads. We have reached an area in the southern ocean called the convergence, where the cold polar water meets the warmer currents, and the temperature has dropped a couple of degrees. The mate Peter Petroff was busy today so the description of the top layer will have to wait until tomorrow, until then, Alison

27^th Feb

Hello everybody, it’s a week tonight since we left Hobart and although time has flown, it seems a lifetime ago too. The sea got very rough last night ( 5 metre swells ) so everything that isn’t stowed away carefully goes flying across the room. The chairs in the dining room all have wires underneath them with clips attached, so they can be anchored to the floor when its rough. All the benches and tables have rubbery blue cloth to stops things slipping, and we are still staggering around like drunks. Sometimes the ship hits a wave with such force that it feels as though we’ve hit a rock.

But the very exciting thing that happened today was that we passed our first iceberg, a huge thing, about as big as a ten story building, in the shape of a crouching lion. After we first saw it, it took about two hours to get level with it, and we passed quite close, about a kilometre away. The shape and colour was very beautiful and the base was like an icy beach. As the waves washed against the beach they turned pale turquoise, with white foam laced through. We stood on the top deck photographing and it was freezing in the howling wind. Anyway, I’d better go to bed, I had a big headache today so I need to rest. Shipboard life is so busy, cheers, Alison

28th Feb
Hi everybody, when I looked out my window this morning there were two icebergs on the horizon. The seas were pretty big overnight but today it was wild. We were steaming into the wind and 6 metre waves, but there were also big swells coming in from the side every now and again. I think they call it “confused seas”, anyway, it makes the ship rock hugely. Our biggest tilt today was 27 degrees and you really had to hang on. The crew have closed all the hatches on the dining room ( the mess ) portholes because they go underwater on every big roll and can break if the seas are too big.

Peter the Mate gave me a tour of the upper deck after lunch, despite the crazy weather and showed me the radar, weather and satellite equipment and the compass, which has two iron balls on either side of it to compensate for the magnetic pull of the poles. The wind was so fierce that it was difficult to breath and I was frozen after a few minutes, but after we moved to the back of the deck, out of the wind, it was beautiful. The sun came through the clouds and turned the sea into a churning silver mirror. The ship lurched and rolled beneath us (  it feels a bit like riding a bucking horse ) and we watched an albatross sweep across the waves, with two massive icebergs as a backdrop. It feels as though we are approaching an ancient icy kingdom and the icebergs are sentinels guarding it. It snowed a tiny bit this morning, cheers, Alison

1st March
Hello everybody, we are steaming past more and more icebergs. I walked around the upper deck this morning and counted 14, some in close, white as white, and others far out on the horizon, almost blending into the sky in a hazy grey. One monster we passed this afternoon had a flat top tilted towards us, criss-crossed with crevasses, and where the cracks broke through the side, the sun was shining through in glowing blue, really beaming, as though it was lit from within. Sometimes today the weather was clear and sunny, hot if you were out of the wind, and the next minute it would be snowing.

After lunch, Peter the Mate ( its like the deputy captain ) continued his tour of the ship and today we looked at the rescue equipment. If someone fell overboard you’d throw them a life ring, though the water is so cold you would probably be dead before you could reach it. Next size up are the life rafts, white capsules about 1 metre long, lashed to the deck, but which inflate into rubber rafts with canvas tops when tossed over board. Then come the life boats, one on each side, big orange capsules. They look like giant kinder surprises and I hope I never have to get into one, other than for a look. They fit 68 people, sitting side by side on hard fibreglass seats and the toilet is a bucket. There is a motor and steering equipment, but once you run out of fuel there are oars, and its nearly 2000 nautical miles to Hobart. There are water tanks, but the water would be frozen, so that could be tricky, and the food is sea biscuits. The safety equipment includes fishing line and hooks, can openers and waterproof matches. Anyway, the Aurora Australis feels very safe, so I am going to bed to sleep peacefully, zzzzzz, Alison

2nd March
Howdy everybody and welcome to any new people. I should have a web page organised in the next couple of days where I’ll keep the past reports and some photos for you to see. After another night of blissful sleep, rocked in my bunk by the mighty sea, I woke up early and got up on deck in time to see the dawn, streaming golden rays in the east, and big tabular ( flat topped ) bergs silhouetted against the yellow sky. It had snowed overnight, so the deck was pretty slippery, but the sea is calm so it’s not so hard to get around. We are getting used to all the white and pale blues of icebergs so it was a surprise to see a green one close to the ship today. It was really dark green. They are called jade icebergs and it looked like a huge, smooth piece of jade, with white foam breaking over it. I think they are formed when the ice is a mixture of fresh and salt water. After lunch I saw a berg with a big black stripe through it; dirt that had been there since the ice was part of a glacier grinding slowly over the Antarctic land.
Peter the Mate explained some of the instruments on the bridge that are used to steer the ship safely across the ocean.

One screen has a high resolution satellite image showing the ice and clouds, another is a GPS tracking system, showing exactly where the ship is , ( one chart shows every track the Aurora has made since 1989 ) another shows all the environmental data, salinity, water temperature, fluorescence. There is so much data processed, all by computer, but just in case the power goes off and the batteries run out, there are old fashioned instruments too, like a little book called “State of Sea” that has photos of sea and descriptions of the weather so you can tell if you are a Force 5 or a Force 6 gale.
Better go, I am worn out, had to draw a car for one of the crew’s birthday today and it was very hard to make it look ok, a horse would have been much easier, best wishes, Alison 

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