Last January, Jamie Young embarked on a journey to retrace Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic. Jamie and his crew faced challenging sea conditions, including capsizing multiple times and enduring a violent storm. The boat they used, the Tom Crean, was a replica of Shackleton's boat, but with some improvements. Despite the difficulties, Jamie and his crew were able to navigate their way through the treacherous waters and successfully complete the journey. They acknowledged that their experience was likely more challenging than Shackleton's, but they also had more options and chose to prioritize their safety.
Last January, we broadcast an interview with Jamie Young, who is the owner of Killary Lodge and Little Killary Adventure Centre. That interview was just prior to his departure for the Antarctic Ocean to retrace a famous journey undertaken by the Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton before the First World War. Shackleton's ship had been destroyed in the ice and the crew became stranded on Elephant Island, which is the northernmost island of the Antarctic Peninsula. Because the rest of the world was not even aware of their plight, Shackleton knew that there was no hope of rescue for the 27 crew members unless they could get word out.
The nearest human settlement was a whaling station on the island of South Georgia, over 800 miles by sea further north. Shackleton had no option but to try and get help from there and to that end he and four volunteers sailed there in the ship's lifeboat. This was a record-breaking feat of survival in a tiny boat sailing through ice-laden and mountainous seas. To commemorate this trip, Jamie and his five friends from sailing and climbing backgrounds undertook to retrace the journey in a newly built replica of the original ship's lifeboat.
This journey started on the 20th of January when the six crew members climbed into their tiny craft and headed off into the unknown. Six weeks later in early March, Jamie Young returned from his adventures and yesterday I met him at Killary Lodge to hear how he got on. The name of the replica vessel in the interview is the Tom Crean and the support vessel is the Pelagic. Jamie, once again we're sitting here in the beautiful Killary Lodge looking westwards over Killary Harbour.
We can see right out to the mouth of the harbour. I imagine this presents a somewhat more tranquil scene than where you've just returned from. Can you tell us something about the boat you were in and the sea conditions you experienced? The Tom Crean was built actually in a FOSS project up near Kilkenny. It was a copy, as far as we could make a copy, of the James Caird, which was the original boat which Shackleton and Tom Crean and Worsley used.
This one though was coal-moulded and we had a solid coal-moulded deck as opposed to the original boat which would have had a canvas deck made of sailcloth and tea chests and things like that I think. Our equipment was different and they were using for instance reindeer skin sleeping bags in the story and the accounts you read about the reindeer skin got very damp and all started to come apart and the hairs from the reindeer skin were starting to smell and the whole thing was quite obnoxious.
They also had stones as ballast to keep us stable but they all got extremely damp and wet. Every picture you see of them actually sailing there's always somebody with a saucepan bailing water out. So you had a somewhat drier passage? Well I wouldn't actually say it was dry. We discovered a few things apart from the three main occasions where we capsized in the boat. We also found there was a lot of condensation. You're still within the Antarctic convergence zone down there which means the water is very cold and with five people in a very small space we got huge volumes of condensation and that dripped onto everything so we were just very very wet.
So there was a kind of a disadvantage to being fully decked? Well the alternative was probably worse than just being damp or wet. We had three gales in as many days or over six days but one every two days we had at the start and the gales themselves weren't too bad. There'd be winds up to 30-35 knots and we were able to sail across the wind with just a mizzen and a small jib up and if it was a bit of a stronger gale then we'd reef them down and whilst we weren't going where we wanted to go we were at least not going backwards.
But then we had this storm which built up over two days which was very dramatic. The wind speeds were up to 60 miles an hour and I don't know if you ever stuck your head out the window at 60 miles an hour and in a rainstorm it was very difficult if not impossible to look up into the wind because all the surf, all the sea spray was being picked up off the water and blasted down at you.
It was coming from the direction you wanted to go in. The exact usual thing with sailing. Yes, we were actually going backwards. We used GPFs which are incredible machines and they were able to tell us exactly where we were. GPFs are the Global Positioning System, a form of navigation. That's right, using satellites and gives you a very accurate, apart from the actual position, it tells you how far you've got to go to your next what they call waypoint and what speed you're doing over the ground and things like that.
And these were telling you you were going backwards. Absolutely, and at one of the gales we did have a worrying moment. There's another island which is part of the South Sandwich Group which we were getting blown down towards, which we got within 25 miles of. If we'd been in the storm situation, 25 miles was not enough room to play with. As we discovered in the storm, you don't have any manoeuvrability at all. And steering the boat was done from inside, was it? No, you steered the boat from outside, had a cockpit.
Oh, there was a cockpit, so some poor soul had to be out there. Yes, actually we had two people out there, but one to keep company and to talk to somebody or chat and all the rest of it. The conditions for people in the cockpit must have been appalling. They were. When the storm was at its highest, we did actually bring everybody down below. In that case, you had the sails down as well? We took all the sails down.
As it got stronger, we experimented with different combinations. We had the mizzen up for a while to try and keep the stern round and the bow up into the wind. We had a sea anchor out with rope from the bow, but the sea anchor... The sea anchor is a kind of a parachute thing you string from the bow, yes. And that, unfortunately, tore asunder. It's made of canvas and sort of a wooden frame. And that, although we didn't know it at the time, the bow kept on falling off.
And when the storm had actually died down and we pulled it up, there was just bits of canvas left on the end. So it wasn't able for the conditions at all? No. It's really surprising, even in a small boat like that, but in the size of the seas we were in, what it can do to things. You'd think they were bulletproof, these sea anchors, but it just came apart. Yes. I mean, we're talking about a quite tiny boat here.
You know, maybe something the size of an IS van or something. Exactly. With five people in it. Four bunks and the last person had to just sit against one of the bulkheads and snooze on there, just sitting there. You would sit up in it. If you sat up in it, you would be touching the deckhead. Yeah. And could you actually stand in it? No, not a chance. So everybody stooped all the time? It was about, I suppose, three foot six headroom.
Right. And that was it. Three foot six from the floor to the ceiling? That would be it, yeah. Well, a 23-foot boat, you can't. So you're literally crawling around the place? Yes, you have to crawl into it and turn around most carefully. You do get into a rhythm after a while. Yeah. And everybody has to live with somebody sticking their foot in it a year if they're trying to take their boots off or something like that.
So it's very like being in a tin can being tossed about by the waves. Even in the gales, when the storm came along, we couldn't read at all. But in the gales, initially, it was very, very difficult to read because the boat would be looping around. I found just keeping your eyes on the page was impossible. Yeah. That can also lead to seasickness. Exactly. Well, funnily enough, none of us really were physically seasick. But I think that the movement and the cold and the general dampness discouraged, you know, you were talking about a sort of survival circumstances for some of the times.
Yes. It was a great grip. Well, the first time the boat went over, it was a surprise for everybody and a shock and all the rest of those things. You get a silence and then suddenly there's this rushing noise like a train's coming and then the boat gets hit and it just tumbles over and everything's happening so fast that you don't really know how long it's taking or what's happening exactly. So you're completely roared through 360 degrees.
Yeah. I remember for a while we were upside down and I had landed on what they call the deckhead, which is the top of the boat normally. Yeah. It didn't look like a lot of work. And I had a little perspex hatch just above my bunk and I was looking out through this perspex hatch at the mast and the rigging and all the rest of it in the water, very green-looking water. And my first thoughts were that this possibly was it.
And we were going to come back up. Thanks for the act of contrition. Yes. They tell me that it was a quick way to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think that you were suffering conditions worse than Shackleton and his crew might have experienced? Well, I can only think that it must have been. They were hardy people and they were sailors and they'd spent their life at sea and they'd just come out of a difficult situation.
So I hesitate to say, but they might be better sailors. I don't believe they would have survived the storm of that ferocity. In the book, they did have bad weather. If they had been capsized, they wouldn't have had a chance. All the stones that were just laid in the bottom of the boat would have fallen out and torn the deck off and that would have been it. That would have been it. And the other thing about their trip is that they had no options.
Their only option was to get some help from somewhere. The other option was to stay on land and fade away and die. Yes. So they just had to go, take their chances, and luckily they made it. We did have options. We didn't feel it was worth being dead heroes. So obviously when you had that first capsize, the confidence in the boat was a little bit shaken. I think everybody's, yes, everybody's confidence, even in their own expectations of what the trip was going to be about, how the boat had stood up well.
We found that the hatch into the cockpit kept most of the water, but it wasn't watertight and we did get a lot of water into the boat. We had a pump inside the boat and another one outside, so we were able to pump it dry. I think at that stage, all of us were actually inside the boat for the first capsize and we pumped out the inside and then two people went outside and pumped the cockpit dry as well, once the level had gone down a bit, and checked on things and generally...
So there was somebody outside the boat for the second capsize, wasn't there? That was myself, yes. I remember I went, I mean it was just chance because other people had been out, but we went out occasionally just to get a bit of fresh air, go to the loo, which was quite exciting. But actually, by that stage, we'd lost the buckets and been swept away. I think that could have been one of the biggest blaws on the trip, wasn't it? Yes, absolutely.
But by that stage, we weren't eating a huge amount, so it wasn't that big of a requirement. I think fluid intake was what we were more aware of. In fact, during the storm, we felt it was unwise to cook anything because if we had done a capsize and there was boiling water and stuff going around, it wouldn't do anything. So on top of everything else, there wasn't even the consolation of warm food? No, not for a good while.
No, certainly. You were running a watch system, obviously. You took turns and who had to go outside? Yes, we normally had two people outside for a couple of reasons. One, they could chat to each other and have something to talk about. So they could also change fairly regularly, make sure the other fellow wasn't getting too cold. And just if anything had to be done, it's much better to do it with two people. Not that you can do it too much in a 23-foot boat.
Well, you were saying there that you were actually outside when you had one of the capsizes. Yes, I just went outside and I just clipped in when I got outside and tried to look up to weather and couldn't see anything, really. Then you clipped in the viper. Could you explain that? Well, we had a nylon strop with a hook on it, one end of which was attached to a line on the boat and the other was attached to a harness which we wore.
This was to prevent you from being lost if you fell overboard. Exactly, if you fell overboard or the boat got turned over. But just out of the corner of my eye, I saw this. It looked like a wall of water just coming up to the boat. And I knew that this was going to be another one. And so I just had time to get underneath a bit of the deck and I put my hands up on the deck and my feet on the floor of the cockpit and jammed myself in there.
And then again, it all happened so quickly. You're not sort of thinking too much. And so there's a roll of water and the boat goes over. And usually you're in foam-filled water, which manages to get in around your neck and everywhere. But it's not like putting your head in a bath. It's not solid water. And eventually you come roll back up again. That's when a lot of water comes into the cockpit. Then you're standing in water.
You have to start pumping straight away. So you're wearing eye skins, not a wetsuit. No, we're wearing eye skins, yeah. So you're obviously soaked when that happens. We had very good gear, muster gear. And we had thermal underwear and these fleece sort of things and the outerwear as well. And even when it's wet, the good thing about it, even when it's wet, it's warm, which is very important. So if you stand long enough, it'll all drip out.
We were discussing afterwards, whoever does it next, we'd have a lot of advice. You can get survival suits and on reflection it probably would have been a better thing to have because you would have stayed drier. But the Pelagic, which was our support boat, which is a 60-foot steel yacht, in those conditions she was 15 plus miles away and she couldn't do anything other than look after herself. She couldn't maneuver or sail or whatever. We were able to keep in touch on the VHF to report our position regularly, plot our position and her movements and all the rest of it.
But they were finding it equally tough. Well, the important thing in any situation like that is try and become a positive side, if there is one. And we did try and eat easily edible food as often as we could and try and keep each other's spirits up again as much as we could. There's no sleep pattern. You sort of grab a sleep when you can. And when you get exhausted, you are able to just eventually nod off for 15 minutes.
But it's quite difficult because when you do that you nod off and usually it's quite a deep sleep and then you'll get shaken out of the sleep by another wave thumping the boat if it's not going over. And you're dreaming of green fields and picnics and all the rest of it. A rude awakening. So everybody was pretending to be dozing rather than singing songs or telling jokes. There wasn't a lot of that. Because it was cold and we were wet as well, it was very important to get out of your wet gear when you could and get into a sleeping bag and warm up.
If you didn't do that, one of the guys, John, did have what they call a cold nip in his ear which does damage to the nerve ends in his feet. Wow, yeah. That's permanent damage, is it? No, we felt we caught it in time and made sure he kept his... But it's very painful because if you catch it in time then the feeling comes back. When it's coming back it's very, very sore. You think you've got pins and needles.
When we talk about the cold, you're talking about what kind of temperatures? Well, the sea temperature would have been one degree or two degrees. One degree, just above freezing. Exactly, yeah. The air temperatures would have been something similar. Probably a little bit warmer because they're very, very windy. The other thing which very few people think about in a storm is the noise. Right. The noise is just constant. When it starts to sort of scream through the rigging, it becomes very annoying, actually.
Well, the board is kind of like a felding box. Yeah, it's getting bashed around by the waves and then you've got the wind and you can listen to the wind and as it rises, you know, as a gust comes, you can hear it just blowing through the wires. You're wondering what's going to happen next. It's very worrying with all the noise all the time. There's no way you can get out of the noise. You were talking about the support vessel there, the pelagic.
You were saying that was 15 miles away. You then had a third capsize and eventually you had to call help from that boat, didn't you? Well, we didn't actually, no, we didn't call help from them. We did have a third capsize and we had other minor sort of incidents where water would have come over the boat. We had three major incidents. What we decided to do was to review how we were going to get on for the rest of it, what our options were.
We were all quite keen to continue, so it wasn't a rescue situation. What period of time were we talking about here? How many days? Well, the storm builds up over about two days, so you'd have to see if that stays for how long. I think it was seven, eight days. Seven, eight days, yeah. So you were reviewing the situation after seven or eight days. Good time to review. Probably started reviewing it before that. We were able to get a forecast through the pelagic from this guy in America who...
By radio. By radio, but this is a very special forecast. You pay $130 each time for it and he's able and has access to great computer power and satellites and all sorts of things. And we had used him before at the stars and various other bits of it. And his forecast was, which it turned out was correct, was for stronger winds, for 75 knots. Oh, my God, yeah. To come also from the north, from a depression which was forming south of the Falkland Islands and it would also go on for five days.
And we've just felt that it would also... It would have been sending us backwards again. We just felt that it wasn't going to work. You had no engine, obviously, on board. No engine, no. We had a pair of oars on. Right. So you were reviewing the situation in the light of this forecast. The rollovers had been shattering and some people found them much more shattering than others, which is inevitable, really. So, all in all... The other thing was because the pelagic couldn't do anything for us in those conditions, and our fear was that we'd been rolled over for three times.
We'd come upright, so we were confident. But in exceptional seas, instead of getting a rollover, sometimes you get the sea which just breaks, bang, on top of the boat. And one of our fears was that it would just... Smash the deck or something. Exactly, or smash the cockpits or just drive solid water into the boat. It would destroy ship's thinking. Yes, very quickly. We didn't have a life raft or anything like that. We were weighing everything up.
We were starting to have problems with the aerial on the VHF. We lost radio contact with the pelagic. They wouldn't know where we were. They could sail to our last known position, but it was a small boat in a big sea. And we had talked about in the past how we were going to transfer in bad conditions. Basically, we discovered that it just wasn't possible. Right, and the difficulty is that you've got two boats being whacked against each other in the waves.
Well, yes, the pelagic just couldn't manoeuvre. She couldn't... At 60 knots, she couldn't come... She was miles away. She couldn't even make it over towards us. Right. As Paddy said, time to count the children. LAUGHTER There were quite a few, so... LAUGHTER Right, so the result of the review was... We decided... One of the things we decided to get was this forecast. If it had been a more reasonable forecast, the consensus was we would have kept going.
But because it was such a bad forecast because of his accuracy in the past, we couldn't not ignore it. So we decided that we'd wait for the seas to die down to make a sensible transfer. Well, you were hoping they would die down, even. Well, exactly, yeah, yeah. I mean, the escape wasn't prepared to come up alongside... Well, he didn't come up alongside, to make the transfer in anything that was too dangerous. So... Well, the can eventually...
Yeah, the weather moderated, and what we did, in fact, he took us in tow when he eventually came over. It took about two days for it to die down. So there you were, 10 days. He put a rope down to us, and we tied on, and then he sent a rubber dinky down another rope, and we transferred. Oh, I see. All the gear, in fact, and whatever we could. That was actually a very laborious task. Well, there was some enthusiasm.
LAUGHTER OK, yeah. So we could make the transfer. The bigger boat seemed like civilization, I suppose, after your 10 days. It did, yeah. We were able to stand up, cook food. He had a stove on board, so he could dry our gear. He had a toilet, and we, in fact... Well, we were only... And then we were able to... He had the telephone on board, so we could phone home. We could phone home, even. And one of the decisions we took at the time, as well, was to sink the boat.
That was a hard decision to take. It was. Janet himself, actually, was the guy. He'd been in charge of the building, and he drilled holes in the bottom of it. But we felt it wouldn't be a good thing to have, say, washed up in Australia, or somebody come across it and wonder what had happened to the people on it. Right, yeah. So we left hatches open, and he drilled holes in the bottom of it, and she was slowly filling up as we left.
We didn't see her actually go under the waves. Well, there's a certain poetry to leaving her out there, isn't there? Yeah, it was a bit of a grey day, as well, actually, at the time. Yeah. And, yeah, you just saw this little boat bobbing up and down... Yeah. ...as we started the rest of the trip up to South Georgia. Yeah. So, was there... OK, so you left the town cream behind. Was there... There was obviously things where you feared for your life.
Oh, yes. I mean, that was... That had to be part of the equation, as well. Yeah. I mean, in our discussions about whether or whether not to leave the boat, you know, people's feelings. Yeah, there were... We'd had a life-threatening... Yeah. ...situation. Yeah, yeah. Everybody, yes. You couldn't ignore the seas. You're talking, you know, 30, 35 foot swell. Yes, yes. And some of them, as we discovered, were breaking, which are the dangerous ones. Yes. And you get very steep areas of water.
It's... I mean, you would get quite similar conditions in the North Atlantic, hence off the Irish coast. Yes. And, you know, they're no less frightening... Yes. ...there than they are here. Yes. But it's colder there. It's colder, and it's a lot further from anywhere. Yeah. I mean, there's no helicopter rescue. Yeah. You're down in the middle of the Scotia Sea. It's... That's one of the other things you notice. It's just... You're miles from anywhere. Yeah. There's nothing down there at all.
Yes. Yes. Okay. You had quite a sophisticated communication setup, which I suppose the original expedition didn't have. No, the original expedition had nothing at all. And, I mean, throughout this, not only the sail, but the walk across South Georgia, which we successfully completed, the admiration that we had, and everybody we talked to as well, had for Shackleton and Tom Crean, and the rest of them was, you know, great. Yeah. Could you tell us a little about the communications? Well, we had ESAT DigiPhone, where our main sponsors are on the trip, and they provided us with an IMRASAT satellite telephone communication system.
Right. But that wasn't in the Tom Crean, was it? It wasn't, no. Yeah. It was too big for that. Yeah. It was based on the Pelagic. It had its own... You have to have a special aerial. Right. And... But the aerial is the biggest part nowadays, the size of a laptop. And basically it was a laptop that we could communicate with the telephone, the laptop side. Yeah. So when you were on the Tom Crean, you used to radio the Pelagic, which are used...
With VHF, yes. Via the satellite link. Yes. Right. And John Burke, who was our sort of manager and mentor, was in charge of those communications. Yeah. And you also had some form of email communication. Yes, we had. Through the satellite communication system, we were on email. Now, we had a slight problem with our software, and we couldn't access email directly. We had a file transfer system going with somebody in Japan, John Burke's sons, in fact. So all the email went to the address in Japan, as it turned out.
Yeah. And then we transferred files when we could. Yeah. And we were actually amazed by the number of people from around the world, predominantly Irish, but sometimes of quite distant connections, leaving messages. And they must have been surfing the net or whatever to come across it in the first place. Yeah. But they did. They left messages. And it was always very, very popular. Yeah. You must have been fairly debilitated after your 10 days, once you got out to the Palagic.
How did you feel? Well, there was a great sense of relief for everybody, for sure. Yeah. And you do a trip like that, and sort of people say, God, what's your next one? But there was so much that went on with that trip, and I think it needs a time for, I think, and all of us would agree, for reflection on how we cope with it, how we cope with each other, how close you had come to not coming back from the whole experience.
Yeah. So even after that, you had done your 10 days in Top Cream, and now you're on the Palagic. Then the next thing you had to do was go ashore and do yet another expedition. Well, we went to the northern tip of South Georgia, just in a bay there for a couple of days, just to dry out. Probably took you a few days to get there, even, in the Palagic. Took us three days, yeah, to sail up.
South Georgia itself is a fascinating place as well. I mean, the wildlife, you've got fur seals, elephant seals, all sorts of penguins, and around it you do see whales of various descriptions. It's an island that rises straight up out of the sea. It's a bit like the Kiri Harbour in that you step on shore and it's all uphill. Yeah. And covered in ice. Yeah. And the glaciers coming down to the sea and carving into the sea all the time.
So bits of ice are breaking off into the sea. Yeah. Oh, there's quite a lot of ice floating around there. Yeah. And the same thing in Elephant Island. An interesting fact is that all the glaciers on these islands are retreating at an ever-increasing pace. Global warming, I guess. Yes. I mean, I just don't know. We don't know whether it's cyclical or whether it is global warming. Yeah. But very noticeable from speaking to people, even people who have been there five years in some cases, that they have noticed the shrinking of the glaciers, which is a very big...
I think. If they shrink that quickly, that's very big. Yeah. And all this wildlife you're talking about is semi-tame, is it, and unused to people? The elephant seals just lie there and you can go up and pat them on the back. Yeah. An elephant seal is a big animal, isn't it? Yeah. The bull would be bull seal, bull elephant seal, what they call a beachmaster. Yeah. That's when they're actually mating. The beachmaster has a harem of, I don't know, 100 females.
Wow. And he fights off all comers. And he would weigh up to four tons. Yeah. The females would be probably half their weight. Four tons he weighs. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And you probably can't move that fast, but you're more in danger of getting sat on than... Squashed to death. Squashed to death, yes. The other ones, the fur seals, which are quite vicious, they will come and attack you. They will actually come and attack you. If you get between the young and themselves, or the water and themselves, they will make a dash for you.
Male and female, will they? They will, yeah. Yeah. And we carry sticks. Are they big animals? That's what's compared to the elephant seals, or not? About the size of a calf. Right. A reasonably sized calf. Yeah. And they can move quite a lot more quickly. Right. And were you actually attacked at any stage? Well, yes, but we give them a few belts to stick, and they do retreat. Yeah. We were talking to Skip, who was the skipper.
Oh, the gladiator. If you get bitten by one, you've got to get out and be a hump full of antibiotics. Wow. Because they don't clean their teeth. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right, okay. The fur seal population is booming. The interesting thing about South Georgia is the effect that humans have had over the last century, basically. The fur seal population was decimated in the early part of the century primarily for their fur, and the fur was used for wearing, but also things like top hats.
The top hats in the olden days were made of fur seal blood. Elephant seals were shot for their blood then. So the margarine you had in the 50s and 60s was mainly made of whale, elephant seal blood. Yeah. And the whales, there's five main whaling stations. Right. We visited, I think, all of them, which were set up in 1906 was the first one by a Norwegian. Yeah. They were left in the late 60s as if people had walked out the door and just left everything behind them.
So you had cinemas, hospitals, accommodation, huge big workshops for repairing boats, foundries for casting, all sorts of things for boats. They had to be completely self-sufficient. And the sealers, the actual sealing boats are still down there. There's about half a dozen. Some of them sunk, just sticking above the water, and some of them up on the shore. Wow. Some of them ready to go, just about if you put enough work into it. Yeah. And there's talk about rescuing one at the moment.
Yeah. But the whole reason that industry collapsed was because of overfishing. All the whales were killed. Right. And we did meet a survey ship from Woods Hole, it was an American ship, doing a world survey from Woods Hole Marine Institute in America. And they were doing a survey of whales. But the good news is that they are starting to come back. Yeah. The only one they don't know about is the blue whale, which they don't see.
Right. But they won't know for 200 years whether the species will actually survive, because the time for maturity of the young, to being young, to surviving there. Yeah. The seas they swim in. Yeah. It's going to take that long before they know whether the species will survive. So there are a few around still. Do you know what the life expectancy of a blue whale is? They live for 120 years. Oh, yeah. Or have been known to, I think.
Yeah. But the great albatross, which nests on Bird Island, which is on the northern tip, which we went ashore onto, it's the biggest bird, the biggest marine bird, which would have a 12-foot wingspan. 12-foot, yeah. And you can walk up to them on their nests. Yeah. Wow. And, you know, one of the guys, the head of the British Antarctic Survey, has a base there. And he just pulled out the wings to show us how big it was.
And it just sat there. They don't mind their wings being pulled out? No, they don't. They're used to all these biologists measuring them. And, again, they're under threat, unfortunately, because longlining has become a very, it's sort of a new system. And that is a longlining for Antarctic cod, I think. And they dive on the baited hooks on the water and get dragged underwater and drown. And their population is decreasing by about 5% to 10%. Wow. I suppose the good news is that the whales are on the increase.
Yes, that's the good news. And they are coming up with ways to stop the albatross. For instance, if you put streamers over the back, the length of the line out of the water, they won't dive on them. Oh, I see. Set the line underwater. Yeah. That's the only alternative. Yeah. You mentioned penguins. Did you see penguins? Yes, we saw quite a few penguins. The king penguins, which would be about the biggest that we saw. They were in various stages.
Some of them were molting. Some of them were young. Yeah. They tend to live in quite big colonies in set places. Yeah. Gentoo, Chinstrap, Magellan. I think those were the four main places. Yeah. Can you tell us about the terrain? You had to walk across this island of South Georgia and then... Yes, we went up to Gritvicken, where there was a... we had to enter into. There was a postmaster, harbourmaster. Yeah. There was also a British garrison of about 18 troops there.
Right. The commanding officer's name was actually Ciaran Fitzgerald. I see. Good Irish there. Absolutely. Then we went around. We had a few days more there to sort things out and do some preparation for the trip. Then we sailed around to Harkin Bay, which is where Shackleton and Tom Crean in the James Care sailed into. We put a plaque up in the cove, which they landed at initially, Cape Cove. Right. The mouth of Harkin Bay. Yeah. That took about half a day to do that.
Then we sailed up to the end of Harkin Bay to where they'd actually sailed up to and left James Care and walked over the two of them, the three of them, sorry, Shackleton, Tom Crean and Masters, was it? Yeah. They did their trip in winter. Yeah. Which, funnily as it may seem, is probably a better time to do it. Right. Because there was much more snow on the ground, which would cover the crevasses. Oh, yeah. Makes the belt smoother as well, I think.
Exactly. They were fortunate as well. They'd had a couple of days or two and a half days or two days of good weather, so they walked virtually non-stop. Yeah. But to say that, one of the incidents in the book is when they are two-thirds of the way across and it is night, although it's a clear night, but they're very, very tired and Shackleton allows them to rest. You can have half an hour's rest. Yeah. They all nod off.
Yeah. He actually wakes them up just five minutes later and tells them, well, you've had a half an hour's rest, now's the time to get up. And his reasoning was that if he let them sleep in those conditions, they just wouldn't wake up at all. Right. So he was very conscious of how close death was in that situation. Of course, there was nobody to wake Shackleton up. No, there wasn't. He stayed awake the whole time. The first day was a good day, so we were able to travel quite fast.
Yeah. You were just on foot. There was no snow there. No, there was. It was all on ice. Oh, yeah. Virtually the whole trip was on ice. Yeah. But you weren't able to use skis or anything. Yeah, we did. Oh, you did. But we had skis or crampons where there was enough snow. Crampons are these spikes you put onto your boots. That's right. Yeah. Where there was enough snow, it wasn't skiing. It's cross-country skiing. Yeah. So you're using them more as supports to stop you falling or rolling through.
Yeah. And you just walk with skis on. They're easier than snowshoes. They are. Yeah. And we had skins on them, which skins are like bristles on a badger or something. They will be smooth one way and rough the other way. Oh, yeah. So they would stop you sliding backwards if you were going up a hill. Yeah. So we were able to get reasonably good speed and keep going. Right. So you were able to actually go uphill with these cross-country skis.
To an extent. Yeah. As long as it wasn't too steep. Yeah. And you could move across the conditions much easier. Otherwise, as you say, or if it's soft snow where you'd be sinking into the snow all the time if you were walking, you were able to glide over the top rather than skis. Yeah. But we were carrying very heavy. We had about 65-pound, 70-pound packs. Yeah. We took on food for a week and sleeping bags, tents, all that stuff to try and...
Because we didn't know, every other report we'd read, it had normally taken people easily a week to do it. Yeah. And some people hadn't been able to make it at all even in a two-week period. Yeah. Because the weather can change so quickly. Yeah. So we were very keen to make it as quick as possible. The troops have arrived safely to their place of departure called Stromnes, and Jamie gives us an account of the place. Came down to Stromnes, which is exactly where they arrived back down.
Right. And they went into the manager's house, which they went into. It's still there, still standing. The manager of the whaling station, yeah? Yes. And... That was a Norwegian whaling station, was it? Well, they were all Norwegian. Yeah. Yes, they were all Norwegian. Yeah. And Kristian Salvesen, in fact, held the lease on the whaling stations up until two or three years ago. Right. Because they bought them all out. Yeah. And certainly towards the end of the whaling period.
Yeah. But the whaling stations themselves are much bigger than we ever thought they would be, and much more complex and full of... Is it still inhabited, the place where you... Stromnes. No. No, the only one that is inhabited is Gritviken. Right. Which is off Cumberland Bay, which is next to King Edward Point, which is where the British garrison is. So there was nobody to welcome you at the end of your trip? Well, as it turns out, we'd been there for a few minutes, and some of the army people knew we were likely to finish, and they'd come over by another boat from Gritviken.
They suddenly walked around a corner, which surprised us all. And there was a doctor with them who was able to look at various ailments we had, and gave me painkillers and... Yeah. Antibiotics. For the rib, yeah. So that was... Yeah, and then the pelagic turned up about three hours later, and we went on board, and then sailed round to Gritviken, which is about a three-hour trip. Right. Into the people who were there. Well, it was just...
Gritviken is inhabited... Yeah. By not very many mean people, but, in fact, only two. But it's a very well-protected harbour, and it has a pier, which you can tie up a long line. Right. And just because everybody else was there, it tends to be the place where everybody goes. They're glad to receive visitors occasionally. Well, occasionally, but everybody you meet down there is unusual. They have to be. Yeah, if they wanted to go there for the social scene, it wouldn't be the place.
Yeah. Shackleton is buried there in Gritviken as well. Oh, really? After this, he returned, as all of his crew did, and that was another of the interesting bits of the trip, of the original trip, is he didn't lose anybody in the entire voyage. Amazing, yeah. Everybody got home. Over a two- or three-year period. Something like two and a half years. Yeah. In horrible conditions. Yeah. And he went back down again in 1922, I think I'm right in saying, and on another trip, and arrived in Gritviken, and had a heart attack and died.
Wow. Down there. And his body initially was sent back to Chile, but his wife said that he would have been much preferred to be buried in South Georgia, so they sent the body back, and that's where his gravestone is now. So you were there too, in Gritviken? Yes, and we met all sorts of different characters. There's people called Tim and Pauline Carr, who have a wooden boat built in 1908, I think, which they live on, called Curlew, and they've been living on the boat for 20 years, now moored up alongside a whale catcher, an abandoned whale catcher.
Oh, yeah. In Gritviken. And they're just living there? They are actually looking after the museum. They've started a museum there, a whaling museum. Obviously not very often, but they do have some ships which come in, and it seems to be tourist ships, wouldn't it? It would be, yeah. People are paying a lot of money to go down there. It's fascinating, they've got a lot of facts and figures, and the whole history of the whaling industry. For instance, in the original days, the only bit they would take of the whale is the blubber, so they would peel the whale, a bit like a potato, then chuck away the whole of the rest of the whale, what they call the scrot, and that would float around Cumberland Bay and be eaten, and there'd be all this huge great whale.
Then the new law or regulations came in, they had to use all of the whale, so then they set up, this is one of the reasons why the shore stations were set up, because they had to cut them up with great big steam saws and boil the bones and the flesh to get all the oil out, and they found, in fact, that 30% of the oil was in the bones, so it was a worthwhile exercise, and then they would grind the bones up and they were shipped back to Europe as fertilizer.
Another interesting fact was the 45-yard drum was invented by the Norwegians for the oil industry, because originally all the oil was shipped back in wooden casks, it was sent down there and disassembled, but on the trip back, especially if it hit wet weather or bad weather, the casks quite often would get broken or leak, generally not be a great success, so then they came up with these metal drums, and there's thousands and thousands of them down there, in a stockpile, which are all rusting away now.
That's where they originated from. So you were glad to be back anyway? Yes, most definitely. Would you do it again? That's the question the explorers are always asked. Would you do it again? That particular trip, you can't get away with that more than once, really. Yeah. You used up a few of your night lives there. Yeah, I think so, yes. Sailing across in a 23-foot boat, I mean, I might sail across in a bigger boat, but I think sailing in a 23-foot boat, as basic as it was, is a once-only trip.
I'd be quite prepared to give anybody else who wants to do it the full benefit of our experience and advice, but I would be watching from a distance. OK, Jamie, well, thank you very much for your time, and we look forward to hearing about maybe your next expedition. Thank you very much. Thank you. So that was Jamie Young talking to James Ryan about his exploits with the recent Irish expedition to the South Pole.
