THE
EXPLORER
November 2007
Weddell Sea
A week
before I was to leave on a ship to Antarctica, the world news opened with its lead story:
a cruise ship (The Explorer) in Antarctica just sunk and all 100 passengers had
to evacuate in the middle of the night.
They were all saved. The ship had
hit a small iceberg which pieced the ship with a hole about the size of a baseball. Within 20 hours, the ship was gone
forever.
After
ten hours of trying to bail out the boat, the captain called over all
international systems and announced a “MAYDAY”.
All ships within a 100 mile radius immediately changed courses and came
to the aid of the Explorer. A Norwegian
princess ship came to the rescue and no one suffered any serious injury. The passengers were taken to the Chilean
research center and then flown back to Argentina. The crew from Brazilian Research Center went out
to recover the life boats. All of these
boats were lost but one which now sits on the banks of the Chilean research
center.
Within
a few minutes of hearing about the sunken ship, I began to get phone calls from
family and friends who thought that I should
just walk away from the trip. “It is
just too dangerous” was the mantra of the day.
I was
determined to go on this trip. But I did
decide that maybe, just maybe, I should stop being so damn cheap and spurge and get those damn expensive
Gore-Tex pants so that I would be better prepared in the event I had to
evacuate in the middle of the night. In hindsight, they were a great
investment.
No comments:
Post a Comment