Mawson Station is over 5000 kms from Hobart and just below India if you look at it on a map. We crossed through several time zones and seemed to put our watches back an hour every second day. Its also a bigger continent than Australia which is something I didn’t know.

 

I’m not a sailor. I survived the trip with my stomach contents intact but some days it was a struggle. We were pretty lucky as we had our own cabins and bathrooms. The ship was nice, exciting I guess but it went up and down and side to side and backwards and forwards all at once. We had a few reasonable days and one horror day with 8m seas that we pounded into for 30 hours and then retreated back to calmer waters until the storm passed. I guess we weren’t sailing on Port Philip bay so you have to expect a bit of action. You probably wouldn’t get to see thousands of icebergs or sail through a mob of 200 humpback whales on a feeding frenzy for krill in the bay either. Pretty awesome.

I don’t know how many icebergs you have to see before they become boring. Perhaps they’re like boab trees and everyone is the same but different so you have to look at them all. If you haven’t seen an iceberg or a boab tree then you need to get out more. The shape of the bergs either seem sharp, jaggaged and random, (operhouseesque) or more conservative shapes like rectangles or sleeping triangles. The blue colour is unique. It’s a not real colour. Yep. That describes it. And the whales. Who could not just keep watching them? It was pretty nice to see so many of them in one spot. Just out there doing their stuff. Scoffing krill.

Speaking of food and whales, the AA breakfast, smoko, lunch and dinner spread each day was great and plentiful and I managed to smuggle quite a bit of it off the boat as body fat. From the time I left Broome until we reached Mawson I put on about 8Kgs or more than 10% of my normal body weight. Was 76 and now 84 but working on it. In a downward direction I hope. The ship was dry (alcoholicly speaking) which, in my condition didn’t bother me at all, even though it was probably the longest time I’ve ever spent without having a beer since I was a child. There was one special night after the King Neptune Politically Correct Ceremony where we had a BBQ out on the Heli Deck and we got to have a couple of beers and a chop. It was a beautiful evening even though it was no degrees. We had lovely flat seas and did laps of icebergs as we had plenty of time to kill after our retreat from the big storm that was passing between us and Mawson. I was in no hurry to leave. When your porthole is about 10metres above sea level and you have water bashing against it you start hearing creaking sounds and thumps that you don’t really want to know about. I’m sure it sounded like we hit a few of those whales and icebergs. But we survived (and so did they) and sailed quietly into a beautiful snow covered Mawson on the 11^th of February 2017.