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Following last month’s first ascents of Starbuck Peak and Mt Baume, I am delighted to have completed nine tenths of the Shackleton Traverse with the Crean family, at the end of an extraordinary spell of calm weather in the Southern Ocean. It was just a shame that an unfortunate accident stopped us completing the final part.

When I first did the Traverse in 2000 Reinhold Messner broke his foot on the Crean Glacier. Last week Aileen Crean O’Brien broke her leg at almost the same place, tripping on her sledge just below the famous impromptu toboggan ride made by her grandfather Tom Crean, with Shackleton and Worsley 100 years ago. Unlike Messner, Aileen was too badly injured even to hobble. However, she was able to complete most of the Traverse lying down, towed on a sledge by Crag Jones and me, with Cian, Morgan and Bill sharing out her luggage on the 16 km ski journey to the nearest evacuation point at Fortuna Bay. It all went very smoothly, blessed with calm weather and generally good visibility.

Once we reached Fortuna, skipper Alec Hazell did a brilliant job of getting Aileen back on board Pelagic, in a fairly testing swell. By lucky chance our return to Grytviken coincided with a visit by HMS Clyde, whose captain agreed kindly to give Aileen a speedy comfortable lift to Stanley hospital, 800 miles away. The rest of us hope to go back round to Fortuna Bay during the next few days and complete the final section to Stromness, before sailing more slowly back to Stanley.

After a summer in Andalucia and Edinburgh, Stephen leaves this week on his seventh expedition to South Georgia.  In fact he is doing two expeditions, back to back.  The first trip, aboard Pelagic Australis, is to the southern Salvesen Range, where he and Skip Novak are leading a team hoping to make first ascents of peaks which Stephen first admired 26 years ago when he made the first ascent of Mt Carse.

South Georgia bivouac

Then, around the second week of October, Stephen and Caradoc Jones are jumping ship to Pelagic, to join a grand-daughter and great-grandsons of Tom Crean, who are hoping to follow in their ancestor’s footprints, 100 years after he made his legendary crossing of the Island with Frank Worsley and Ernest Shackleton.  With a reasonably generous window of opportunity, Stephen is very optimistic about managing to do the traverse successfully before sailing back to the Falklands at the end of October.

Yesterday we tied up in Puerto Williams, Tierra del Fuego, at the end of another magnificent Antarctic expedition.  Departure at the beginning of January was delayed by missing baggage and adverse weather, but our skipper, David Roberts, managed to sneak out into Drake Passage during a brief acceptable weather window.  Four days later we tied up in the Melchior Islands – the first of many magical anchorages amongst the islands and channels of the Antarctic Peninsula.

There was a lot of old winter sea ice this year.  At Port Lockroy, Pelagic Australis was driven, bows up, onto an ice sheet where she usually anchors in clear water.  During one passage up the famous, picturesque Lemaire Channel, the boat became a virtual icebreaker.

Pelagic Australis run up onto the ice at Port Lockroy

The support team, Stephen Davis, David McClean and Joakim Ramen, visited numerous wildlife sites, put in some cold hours laying shorelines at difficult anchorages and did a lot of kayaking.  The mountaineering team had a near miss on Mt Luigi di Savoia, sent back by cold winds and an apparent break in the weather.  On Anvers Island we had better luck.  After a two day approach over the Marr Ice Piedmont, Stephen, Jamie Pearson and Geoff Heigh spent a long day (15 1/2 hours) skiing over the Menelaus Ridge and up the Iliad Glacier to the summit of Mt Francais, highest peak in Grahamland.  The descent was fantastic.  As our New Hampshire snow addict, Geoff, put it, ‘Holy Shit.  Six thousand vertical of powder!’  Actually, it was more like seven thousand feet.  What a treat.

Geoff enjoys 7,000 vertical feet of powder

A few days later the three of us were joined by Mark and Sally Dravers, and Kim from the support team (Chung Kin Man’s skis were still at Istanbul airport), on a traverse of Hovgaard Island, before returning to the boat to help with efforts to tow a large ice floe out of the way of another boat – Icebird – which was locked in her anchorage.  The towing failed, but the floe did move later that night, of its own accord, allowing Icebird to escape.

Summit of Mount Scott

The next day the six of us climbed what must be one of the world’s finest ski mountains – Mt Scott.  Apart from the last few hundred metres of unfathomable slush, the whole descent was on powder snow – a perfect end to the trip, before the return passage across the Drake, reaching Cape Horn on January 28th for the celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the first rounding of the Horn.  A big thank you to our wonderful crew – skipper David Roberts, Thomas Geipel and Lizzie Fitzsimmons – for another excellent adventure aboard Pelagic Australis.

Pelagic Australis in ice. Drone Picture by Dave Roberts.

News from Stephen’s current activities will appear here.