Ships – Page 7 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Documentary: Ice Patrol

Ice Patrol is a four part BBC documentary featuring the British naval ice breaking ship HMS Endurance, named for Sir Ernest Shackleton’s polar exploration ship that set sail in 1914. Endurance is much like our SA Agulhas II, except the South African polar research ship is run by the department of fisheries, whereas the British entrust theirs to the navy. The producers of the BBC series Frozen Planet made use of Endurance as a platform for filming in the polar regions – ships with ice breaking capabilities and high tech steering systems are relatively uncommon.

The series starts with Endurance docked in the Falkland Islands, and follows her and her crew through a couple of Antarctic missions during a period of several months in late 2008. They land at South Georgia Island, where Shackleton sought rescue for his crew from Norwegian whalers based there, and visit the old whaling station (as an aside, strangely, we don’t see a single live whale throughout the ship’s time at sea). A group of marines re-enact Shackleton’s trek across the island as a training exercise, which proves to be a tough proposition even with modern camping and climbing equipment, skis, high quality outerwear, and the support of a helicopter for part of the trip. Scientists take sediment cores in order to study climate change, and others conduct an aerial survey of seal populations. We meet a variety of penguins, and members of the crew even pay a visit to a US Antarctic base (Palmer Station) – which has a gift shop!

The final episode is concerned with a catastrophic flood in the engine room that occurred in the Strait of Magellan off Chile (fortunately close enough to help that the civilians on board – the cameramen and producers for the documentary, one assumes – could be airlifted to safety). The ship was nearly lost. The documentary series presents this incident (and other minor whoopsies) in an embarrassingly dramatic light, but it seems that the flooding of Endurance was really that serious. She is going out of service in 2015, the damage she sustained being too costly to repair properly.

After reading Alfred Lansing’s book on Shackleton’s original expedition to the Antarctic, I have been obsessed with the icebound regions of the planet, and this is why we ended up watching Ice Patrol. Perhaps it’s not what everyone would consider gripping television, but we found it very enjoyable. The scenery is beautiful, and the glimpses of shipboard life and navy formality (sitting around on the bridge wearing hats, extreme formality mixed with corporate jargon when addressing one another…) are quite entertaining.

You might be able to get a copy here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise go here.

Bookshelf: The Outermost House

The Outermost House – Henry Beston

Henry Beston spent more than a year living in a two-roomed wooden house on a dune in Cape Cod, and published this classic of American nature writing about his time there in 1929. Living in isolation except for occasional encounters with the staff of the coastguard stations along that stretch of coast, Beston watched the rhythms of the weather and migratory birds as the seasons passed. He saw shipwrecks on the beach outside his home, and felt the wind and waves during the winter months, threatening the dune on which his house stood.

It is from this short volume that Beston’s beautiful quote about animals (“they are other Nations” -you can read it here) comes. Beston’s prose compels one to read on and on, washing the reader along in a flood of effortless prose. He does not often make a demand of the reader, a required pause for thought, but when he does, it is beautiful.

Carl Safina’s latest book, The View from Lazy Point, at first glance may seem to be in Beston’s nature writing tradition, but for himself he explicitly rejects the introspection and solitude that pervades The Outermost House. Safina also tracks the seasons of a year at his home at Lazy Point, but he steps outside of that milieu and identifies the threats to our way of life – and our enjoyment of coastal idylls such as Beston’s – that originate far and wide.

This inward focus does not mean that The Outermost House is outdated or irrelevant. It is a glimpse into an increasingly unusual set of experiences, at the kind of unspoiled location that is more and more rare. Perhaps the best way to read it – apart from as beautiful literature – is as a challenge to seek out wilderness experiences as the antidote to modern life.

The world today is sick to its thin blood for the lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.

You can get a copy here or here, and if you’re in South Africa, here.

Bookshelf: Endurance

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage – Alfred Lansing

Sir Ernest Shackleton was a British explorer who mounted an expedition to the Antarctic in 1914. The intention was for a group of men to traverse the Antarctic continent from sea to sea: the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The expedition did not go as planned; before landing on the continent the expedition’s ship, Endurance, became trapped between ice floes and could not be moved. I’m going to tell you practically the entire story here, but since it’s a historical event it’s not as if I’m spoilering it. Furthermore, if you read one book this year, you should read Endurance. Even foreknowledge of the events it recounts won’t dim your enjoyment.

The men spent six months on board their ship as she drifted with the ice, and when it became apparent that it was about to be completely destroyed by the ice, they decamped – along with their sled dogs – to an ice floe. The floe drifted still further, and when it in turn started to break up – after about five months had passed – the men took to the small boats that they had brought with them from Endurance, and headed for the closest attainable land. Their voyage to uninhabited Elephant Island took a week, during which time the men did not sleep and had very little to eat. They were exposed to the full force of the Southern Ocean, but managed to land on the island and establish a camp.

Shackleton selected a small subgroup of the men, and in the James Caird, a 6.85 metre wooden boat (for scale, just a bit longer than our rubber duck) they set out on the 1,300 kilometre trip to South Georgia Island, where there was a whaling station and contact with civilisation. This voyage took two weeks of herculean effort. Shackleton and his men then crossed South Georgia Island on foot – scaling incredible elevations with no appropriate mountaineering tools and clothing that was threadbare and unsuitable for the environment by dint of its prior length of service as part of their wardrobes. After wrangling to obtain a vessel and attempts thwarted by ice and weather, a boat was able to rescue the remainder of the crew, who had been waiting on Elephant Island for over three months, eating seals and penguins.

I spoke so incessantly about this book while I was reading (actually listening to) it, and afterwards, that it must have driven Tony mad. The courage and resourcefulness of the expedition members astonished me. They entered a hostile environment, one hundred years ago (compare modern preparations for a trip across the Antarctic), and existed in harmony together, in a range of bitterly perilous situations, without loss of good temper or – incredibly – of life. They took photographs and many of the crew kept meticulous diaries, enabling a detailed reconstruction of the events. I suspect that a large part of my enjoyment was related to the fact that I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Simon Prebble, who has a beautiful, expressive voice and was able to bring the diary entries of the crew to life using their various accents.

You can get a copy of the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

There’s a magnificent photo essay about the Endurance (with the expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s original pictures) here.

Flying the drone at Glencairn

We took the drone down to Glencairn Beach one evening so that I could stroll and enjoy the sunset, and Tony could fly a bit. The SA Agulhas (now a SAMSA training vessel) was in False Bay, seen near Roman Rock lighthouse. Tony hoped absently that it had run aground, thus supplying us with a new wreck to dive.

There had been a bit of winter rain, so the Else River was in full flood. The waves on the beach were small and quiet. The sand seemed impossibly smooth and glossy. The colours of the sea and sky melted into one another near the horizon. It was one of those evenings that calms you down, regardless of how the day has been.

View from Glencairn to Simon's Town — View from Glencairn to Simon’s Town

Here’s a little bit of Tony’s video from the evening:

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8vaTYYJ8k0&w=540″]

A view across the valley

Our house (and little dive centre) is located on the edge of a beautiful slice of Table Mountain National Park, below Peers Cave. Living where we do is one of the great joys of our lives. Below Peers Cave is a dune field that stretches to the back of Fish Hoek (and used to stretch all the way to the coast until just over 100 years ago). It’s like a secret slice of wilderness – once you climb over the saddle of the lowest dune, you’re in a valley below the mountain, with a pool of tannin-stained water, reeds, fynbos, and white beach sand.

From the top of the dunes you can see – all the way to Fish Hoek, and all the way across in the other direction to Long Beach, Noordhoek, and the ocean beyond. False Bay about three kilometres away, as the crow flies, and Long Beach about 4.5 kilometres. Tony and I took a winter Sunday afternoon walk and spent some time sitting on top of the dunes. We watched a container ship making its way slowly north towards Table Bay, and we saw the bright billows of cloud and reflections off the sea in False Bay.

Bookshelf: Ghost Wave

Ghost Wave: The Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth – Chris Dixon

Chris Dixon is a surf journalist and author, with strong connections to the big wave surfing community. Nominally concerned with Cortes Bank, a submerged mountain in the deep Pacific ocean that rises nearly to the surface and generates massive waves under the right conditions, Ghost Wave is also a cultural history of big wave surfing.

Cortes Bank is located nearly 170 kilometres west of San Diego, California. It is a seamount that rises from nearly two kilometres’ depth, with a flattish top about 30 kilometres long. Its shallowest point is called Bishop Rock and is very close (1-2 metres at times) to the surface. When swells arrive from the right direction, with a long period, they are pushed up by the sudden depth change, creating waves up to 30 metres high. The wave moves so fast that surfers sometimes need to be towed into it on jet skis (igniting a whole other debate), and being held down on the reef is a potentially fatal experience. This video purports to explain how the wave works, but may require more than one viewing as the graphics whizz by a bit fast. Dixon says that the waves at Cortes Bank may have no theoretical upper limit.

Dixon also describes the known history of Cortes Bank, which has long been known as a navigational hazard to shipping – because of its shallowness at Bishop Rock, and also because sometimes a wave tens of metres high is standing up unexpectedly in the middle of the ocean! The first attempt to surf the wave may have been in the 1960s, but Dixon describes the first “recent” attempts, beginning in 1995.

Big wave surfers are a closed, almost secretive group, privy to experiences more terrifying and incredible than most ordinary people will ever face. Part of this secrecy, I suspect, is a deliberate and unnecessary attempt to add mystique to the sport. Dixon’s insight into one part of the developing big wave culture, and his descriptions of other big waves (Jaws, Mavericks, etc) add welcome colour to this – to me at least – mysterious pastime. It is entirely different to ordinary surfing. For some other perspectives on big wave surfing, from characters mentioned only in passing in Ghost Wave, check out The Wave (all about Laird Hamilton), and this article about Ken Bradshaw.

Here’s what Cortes Bank looks like:

Cortes Bank, 2001 from ENCYCLOPEDIA of SURFING videos on Vimeo

You can get the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.

Movie: Men of Honor

Men of Honor is a contender for the movie with the most stellar cast that you’ve never heard of. Robert de Niro, Cuba Gooding, Jr, and Charlize Theron star in this ficitonalised account of the life of Carl Brashear, the first US Navy African American master diver.

Brashear grew up in poverty and enlisted in the navy 1948, an era during which race relations in the United States were not that dissimilar to race relations in South Africa. He showed dogged persistence in surmounting obstacles far greater than those placed before his white classmates, and successfully qualified as a navy diver in 1954.

Navy divers performed challenging underwater work, retrieving lost nuclear warheads (this happened more often than you’d like to know, during the dawn of the nuclear era), salvage work, repairs to ships, demolitions, clearing harbours, and maintenance (all underwater, of course). In many respects it is much like commercial diving, but with a combat element to it. The underwater scenes are reasonably convincing (except for one shot with a submarine) – suspiciously clear water being my chief complaint, but realism doesn’t always make for good viewing!

This is a highly simplified account of the life of a complex character, but Tony and I both enjoyed rooting for Brashear to overcome the odds and wipe the smirk off various antagonistic establishment characters’ faces. This always happened (no surprises there). Charlize Theron’s role is quite peripheral and, frankly, somewhat confusing. Robert de Niro is always wonderful.

You can get the DVD here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here. It wouldn’t be a total waste of an evening, specially if you had popcorn to hand…

Newsletter: Making waves

Hi divers

Weekend plans

Friday: Seal Rock (Partridge Point) at 9.30am / Shark Alley at 1.00pm

Saturday or Sunday: Roman Rock at 9.30am / Ark Rock to Photographer’s Reef at 11.30am

Dive conditions report

Last Friday we went out in False Bay, and Georgina took this lovely close up of a black nudibranch – thanks for sharing it with us! The visibility wasn’t fantastic, though, and the south easter was a bit strong, which influenced our diving decisions for the rest of the weekend.

We chose to dive out of Hout Bay last Sunday and had really good conditions with 10-12 metre visibility almost everywhere and 15 degree water. We dived below the Sentinel and on the BOS 400, where Christo and Laurine were buzzed by a giant short tailed sting ray. Can you believe it! There were also dolphins just off the harbour wall and they were happy to turn around and say hello as soon as Laurine hit the water with a snorkel. The week has not been all that diver friendly, however, and rain and howling winds have kept us off the water.

Weekend plans

This weekend is one of those really hard to call weekends, as the forecasts vary so wildly you would be forgiven for thinking you were looking at the weather in different cities. Most weather and swell forecast sites claim some south easterly wind with a small swell from the south west. Other sites claim slightly more swell but with a 20 second period from the south. A southerly swell rolls straight into False Bay and gives diving in surge a whole new meaning. Tough call.

So my guess is Saturday will be better underwater than Sunday, but Sunday will be better on the surface. I would like to launch both days, but because the forecast is so uncertain I’ll have to make a call for Saturday late tomorrow afternoon. We will plan to dive Roman Rock at 9.30 and at 11.30 we will drop at Ark Rock and head off towards Photographer’s Reef to see what we can find on the way. You will be very surprised at what there is to see away from the known dive sites.

If we can’t launch on Saturday, I’ll check conditions for Sunday, and we will launch if we can. Sound confusing? Yes. Just email or text me if you feel like a dive this weekend, and I’ll try and make it happen safely and enjoyably.

Other happenings

There is also the possibility that Dungeons will produce a decent wave sometime in the next few days, and that is something to see.

Another option for those at loose ends this weekend is a visit to HMS Iron Duke, a Royal Navy frigate currently visiting Cape Town. This weekend she will be berthed at Jetty 2 in the V&A Waterfront and open to visitors on Friday and Saturday.

regards

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog/

Diving is addictive!

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Bookshelf: Flotsametrics

Flotsametrics and the Floating World- Curtis Ebbesmeyer & Eric Scigliano

I found Flotsametrics to be a profound and moving memoir slash ocean science book. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is an oceanographer who cut his teeth in the oil industry, and later moved to private consulting. His late-life interest in beachcombing, and reading the debris he finds in order to chart the paths of ocean currents, was sparked by a question his mother asked him upon reading about a shipment of Nike shoes that had burst out of its container and floated all over the world.

The chapters of Flotsametrics are organised chronologically and by theme, and Ebbesmeyer mingles his life story with revelations about the oceanographic discoveries and projects he was part of at each stage. Cadavers, bath toys, messages in bottles (lots of these), drifting Japanese junks (seriously fascinating!), hockey gloves, sneakers, sea beans, and plain old garbage give up secrets of ocean circulation.

I stopped and re-read several parts of the book, particularly in the chapters that dealt with the death of Ebbesmeyer’s friends and family members. His meditations on releasing his loved ones’ ashes into the ocean gyres are quite beautiful and profound, notwithstanding an alcohol-fuelled incident in which he and a group of friends flush another friend’s ashes down a toilet in Seattle!

Thanks to Rochelle, I came across this article about a shipment of nautical-themed Lego that spilled out of a container 17 years ago, and is washing up (still) in Cornwall. Ebbesmeyer is lending his expertise here, as well. There is a New York Times review of Flotsametrics here, and one from The Guardian here. If you have to choose between Flotsametrics and Moby Duck, which deals with some overlapping themes, I would recommend Flotsametrics a thousand times over. The author actually has something (many things) to say!

Get the book here (South Africa) or here or here.

Series: Whale Wars, Season 4

Whale Wars is definitely winter viewing, even though the Antarctic whaling season takes place in the southern hemisphere summer. The weather is often quite intense, with large storms rolling through the southern ocean, and when we can’t get out in winter it makes for wonderful imaginary travel through spectacular landscapes.

After the sinking of the fast, carbon fibre racing boat Ady Gil in Season 3, Sea Shepherd obtains the Gojira, a larger and faster vessel that they used to search for the whaling fleet. The Gojira is incapable of travelling through ice fields, which limited its usefulness in the very southernmost reaches of the whaling grounds.

The helicopter and small boats are used extensively in this season. For those who have watched Season 3 already, or plan to watch it, Tony would like to point out that a rubber duck’s pontoon can be temporarily secured to its proper place with a rope slung under the hull and tied together over the top. This may even make it possible to get underway. As usual, a small amount of training in seamanship and how to handle ropes on a moving boat would have gone a long way to prevent some of the mishaps that occur.

This is a short season of only ten episodes, as the Japanese stopped whaling early, citing excessive pressure and increased danger from Sea Shepherd’s harrassment. I found this strange as the nine episodes preceding the halt did not entail much pressure on the Japanese at all. The Sea Shepherds only located the whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru right at the end of their time in the Antarctic, and although they were occasionally tailed by one of the harpoon ships, one or two other harpoon ships were free to continue whaling despite their presence. To my eyes this was one of the least effective campaigns ever, and yet somehow it culminated in the worst whaling year that the Japanese had experienced to date. Whatever works, as one of my former colleagues used to say (usually before doing something statistically questionable).

You can get the DVD here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.