17 minute read
Marion and Gough Finale The Last Voyages of Pelagic Australis
GOUGH ISLAND
A Mission to Kill Mice and Save the Albatross
by Skip Novak, Great Lakes Station
In mid-September of 2020, when I let go the lines at the pontoon in Cape Town and watched Pelagic Australis motor out of the basin at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, I breathed a monumental sigh of relief. She was bound for Marion Island, 1,400 miles to the southeast of Cape Agulhas, a tiny subantarctic particle in the southern Indian Ocean. The success of this voyage would save the Pelagic Expeditions charter business from bankruptcy, but getting to this pivotal moment had not been easy. And what unfolded during the next nine months was an extraordinary story of ducks in a row falling like nine pins.
With COVID-19 restrictions in full force in South Africa, a strict 14-day quarantine and testing of the team to protect researchers and base personnel already on the island was fundamental in our planning for Marion. In addition, we had to navigate the quagmire of permit applications from the South African government and resolve visa problems for incoming crew. We had pulled off no mean feat when the lines were slipped. It was a cliff hanger right up to the moment of departure. Now it was up to crew Chris Kobusch, Dion Poncet, and Juliette Hennequin to get the film and research teams down to the island, offload three tonnes
Top: A wildlife park at Ship’s Cove. Bottom: Great Wanderer and chick.
of kit, and then standby to help them film for the next six weeks. Theirs was the easy part—dealing with the relative simplicity of a cathartic ocean.
“To be truly challenging a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse ….”
I’ve often quoted that one from actor and author Sterling Hayden, as I find it not only highly amusing and spot-on, but even more relevant when you have extracted yourself from a financial pickle, so common in the yacht charter business and magnified beyond all proportion during the last year and a half of COVID-19.
Why wasn’t I on board? This was certainly a trip of a lifetime, and having sailed by Marion five times on around-the-world races, it would have been a privilege to have stepped ashore. But there was more at play that kept me landside. Having dispatched Pelagic Australis from the Falklands back to Cape Town (see Chris and Sophie’s YouTube story on Marion) during the southern winter when it was obvious the normal charter season in the southern South American sector was stillborn, the Marion project was already on the cards as a possibility if everything fell into place. In short, I could not quarantine and prepare the boat at the same time. This would be a two-team operation.
What followed in the middle of that speculative venture was the possibility of a double-stage delivery, taking researchers and cargo to Gough Island later in January and February. Gough is an outlier of Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic, 1,200 miles southwest of Cape Town.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), through its Gough Island Restoration Programme, was scheduled to begin its second attempt at establishing a base of operations
The Met station at Transvaal Cove.
on the island to eradicate an aggressive mice population preying on the albatross colonies. In March of 2020, the team on the island had to abort the project due to the onset of COVID19. I would be skippering the first trip down at the end of January, and skipper Chris Kobusch and mate Sophie O’Neill would be doing the second trip at the end of February. Again, due to a 14-day quarantine requirement before boarding, two separate crews were needed. This, therefore, required another monumental bureaucratic effort to set up and pull off. No time for me to be at sea.
Skip and Lara on a bird seed run.
Gough Island Station.
And what’s more, in the middle of all this project planning — let’s say being in the right place at the right time — I had started a six-month serious negotiation with Greenpeace to purchase Pelagic Australis.
While many of my colleagues languished in parts of South America with nothing or not much to do, I was more than flatout. When it came my turn to sail the first of the two Gough voyages, I was chomping at the bit to shove off and rest a tired mind and soul.
This voyage started out with the required two-week lockdown in a hotel room in Cape Town. After final testing, we were then bussed in negative pressure to Pelagic Australis, where we cast off after a team photo. Leaving Cape Town in any direction can be a shock to the system, with often a four- to five-meter swell greeting you when clearing the outer seawall. That afternoon though, after we motored through the lee under Green Point, a honking southeaster filled, with wind on the beam and a flat sea that gave us a cracking start. By nightfall, we were roaring along fully pressed with a second reef, full Yankee, and staysail — perhaps too much sail, but I was loving it, blowing away the cobwebs. We threaded our way between a few south-about tankers making heavy work of it against the southeast swell — dramatic big-ship imagery in the fading light of an African sunset.
Of the eight researchers we were delivering to Gough, only one was an experienced sailor. The rest all went down with varying degrees of seasickness. I can only imagine that if anxiety does play a role in this unenviable condition, there was probably plenty of it being passed around. Empathy was in short supply,
Displaying great wanderers on Marion.
but there was no lack of sympathy by the crew. This was a rough and woolly start to these landlubbers’ adventure, and I can surmise that if there was any other way to get to this remote island, even a high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) parachute drop, they would have taken it.
Chris and Sophie were, of course, left ashore, having prepared the boat. I put together a local Cape Town crew of Carl “jack of all trades” Martin, Tor Bovim, at 22, aspirant yachtsman who had the “right stuff”, and my 18-year-old daughter, Lara, who was an old hand, having made several Pelagic voyages when little. Upon graduating from high school in November, she worked
on board starting in the bilges, making small change for her gap-year travel. She got her Standards of Training Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW) sorted before Christmas and was awarded a work contract for the voyage.
After the blow petered out late the next day, we all settled into a routine of midlatitude sailing, running due west along the latitude of the Cape in variable conditions. The tactic was to get somewhere near northeast of Gough or even a bit farther west before dropping down south, fishing ourselves between the travelling low pressure systems running along on the edge of the Southern Ocean.
It was mighty pleasant with buckets of seawater thrown over your head first thing in the morning (no other takers!), fishing lines run out, and generally T-shirt weather. With things settling down, the researchers came to life, and we had ample time for them to explain their mission on Gough as they lounged on deck and in the pilot house.
We were carrying 1.5 tonnes of birdseed in the forepeak, plus plenty of miscellaneous kit. The researchers’ job was to catch and sequester two species of land birds, one a bunting and the other a moorhen, and care for them throughout the life and aftermath of the helicopter bombardment of the entire island with poison pellets that was to start in May, supported by the South African ice breaker, S.A. Agulhas II. These two bird populations were fragile, numbering in the hundreds, if that, but the main point was they were both endemic to Gough and only Gough. If the RSPB is committed to anything, it is to stop losing species. If this advance team was successful in capturing
1.5 tonnes of bird seed and equipment out of the forepeak and making ready transport ashore.
and caring for enough of those two species, they would survive. The reality was that many burrowing petrels would be collateral damage in this exercise, but because there are so many, they would bounce back in even greater numbers within a season or two. I know this from the successful rat eradication on South Georgia.
And then, about halfway to the island, the autopilot failed. After we made several attempts to sort this out, it was obvious we had to hand-steer. It was a blessing in disguise, as this gave focus to our researchers, who, with few exceptions, gladly took the helm. This let the crew off the hook to run the rest of the show. Once again, it just goes to show people are happier when kept busy and kept in a routine.
In fine weather on day eight, we raised the island and late that afternoon anchored on a rocky bottom in no shelter under the South African base. There is no easy landing here, and because the island is so small, swell wraps around the headlands and it is seldom calm. The eight RSPB researchers, having survived eight days of cabin fever, were almost walking on water anticipating the landing. I explained we would have to first inflate the tender.
We managed to get them all off safely that same afternoon, timing runs into a bouldery cliff face between the sets. The base people cleared the area of aggressive fur seals by knocking rocks together, an old trick. Luckily, shores like these are often kelpbound, which helps knock down swell, but that can be a struggle for an outboard to plough through. Once ashore, they scampered up a dodgy wooden ladder and then had a 40-minute walk to the base, carrying day rucksacks, as all their baggage was still
Skip above Ships Cove.
South Atlantic watersports.
on board. That plus cargo would have to be jibbed up on a crane that is swung out over the cliff above a tiny inlet a few hundred meters to the north. Formerly, people were also brought up in this fashion in a cage, but looking at the whole operation—the rickety rusty crane, the 40-meter drop hard by a jagged cliff face, and most likely a suspect maintenance schedule—that 40-minute walk over difficult terrain would look very attractive. That evening we managed to get their kit bags off, and the following day the cargo.
The off-loading routine had Carl and Lara hoisting kit out of the forepeak with the gennaker halyard—boxes, cases, and the 40-kilo sacs of birdseed that were loaded six at a time into gravel bags. Tor and I stayed in the inflatable receiving gravel bags let down on the halyard two at a time. We ran them into
the inlet, communicating with the crane driver on handheld VHF via a relay from another guy on shore. Big rollers were incoming, but miraculously they bounced off the back wall of the inlet, cancelling themselves out, and we could hook up the gravel bags with the dinghy almost stationary, although heaving up and down by a meter or two. This is exciting and satisfying work, if you can get it. By early afternoon we had offloaded the lot— and just in time, as the swell was on the way up—only to be informed by the base that a case of beer had been left behind (base supplies!) as well as someone’s ukulele! Next trip!
Those would have to wait, because the wind had changed by the evening, and during the night we lay side-on and into the kelp line and were snatching at the anchor. When raising it early the next morning, it caught badly, and the windlass took to the load, bending the shaft. It was still operable—just. We motored around the corner, eastabout, into Quest Bay, which is open roads but was surprisingly flat and windless. This was the site of the original base in the Glen, established in the 1960s, and had a reasonable rocky beach landing.
After repairing the autopilot motor, we spent the day dinghycruising and taking a token step ashore below a vertical wall of vegetation. It was obvious why this place was abandoned: It’s so remote and rugged that access to the rest of the island was untenable for research, especially the southern end, where the bird colonies are more prolific. Having been to quite a few Atlantic outposts, I had never seen anything so dramatic as Gough. Steep to from the shore, rugged volcanic features, heavily vegetated and wet—I imagined myself walking through it, exhausted. Walking on the open terrain of South Georgia, by comparison, is like a rambler’s gentle outing.
Although Gough is UK territory and part of the Tristan
Shoving off with a load of kit. Route of Pelagic Australis; Map by David Pratt.
group, fishing licenses are sold to South African ships—lucky for us, because the SA Edinburgh’s lobster boats came alongside and peppered our decks with rock lobsters and bycatch fish in return for a few hundred rands.
Late the next day we said our goodbyes to the base over the VHF and then circumnavigated the island before setting a course directly back to the Cape. I can assure anyone who is likely to pass by and stop here that there is not one obvious landing place on the island, save for Quest Bay with the wind in the westerly quadrant. Steep to all around, surf breaks everywhere, and in fact, if you care about these things, it is illegal to go ashore anywhere without a permit, and it’s nye on impossible for a cruiser to get one.
The run to Cape Town was great sailing, running the first three days wing and wing with the mainsail down to the fourth reef trimmed amidships, our Pelagic tactic to make things easy and safe. With no one take care of, the four of us youthful (if not all in age then certainly in character) crew took mid-ocean swims, caught fish, and made sushi extravaganzas followed by Lara’s pies and tortes that appeared daily. In just over seven days, we were tied up in the docks and would soon hand over to Chris, Sophie, and crew and seven more researchers for voyage number two.
MARION ISLAND: Pelagic Australis’s Last Voyage.
Did I mention I did get ashore at Marion? In April, still under contract, Chris, Sophie, our youth squad, and I had to return to the island to pick up three of the film team that had been left ashore at the base during the southern summer. There was no quarantine required before leaving Cape Town, but we could not have any contact with the base personnel on the island due to the risk of bringing COVID-19 ashore. We ran down the 1,400 miles in seven days, comfortably imbedded in the Roaring Forties.
Our job was to recover depots of equipment left on the
Yellowfin Tuna and Sushi.
Wing and wing on the way back from Gough.
beaches. This included dismantling a wooden storage hut down along the coast and delivering it back to base—all part of the original permit’s conditions. It sounds straightforward, but it took five days to accomplish. Due to the size and rounded shape of the Island, there was significant swell everywhere on every day. We had to move our anchor position many times as the fronts went through one after another, and at 46 ° south with the onset of winter, it was getting chilly, with snow already sticking to the high ground.
The cliffs above the east-facing Transvaal Cove host the South African Meteorological Station that has been in existence since the 1940s. It is a science station now, but like so many of these remote pieces of real estate that originally claimed scientific research as a motive for occupation, it was a simple land grab back then, much the same as what happened in present-day British Antarctic Territory during World War II. A British base established in Terra Australis in the early 1940s had the convenient excuse of monitoring German activities in the South Atlantic. This ruse was only revealed when Foreign and Commonwealth Office files that had been closed to the public were discovered by historical researchers in 2010. Let’s call it “the Great Game” of the Southern Ocean.
Despite their beauty, Marion, and its outlier Prince Edward Island, are not for the cruiser. They are even more off the beaten path, on the way to nowhere. Gough, which is sort of on a logical route of a north/south passage of the Atlantic if making for Cape Town, is on the edge of the South Atlantic high at 40° south. Why not at least give it a look? This is hard to justify for Marion though, and again a rigorous permitting process from the South African government is designed to keep you off the island.
And that brings me to a funny story we heard from the people on Gough about a single-hander who, not long ago, spent several days on the island enjoying himself while getting his engine fixed with help from the base personnel. We heard the same story on Marion. Clever chap!
We sailed into Cape Town on April 21. Within three weeks,
Changing out of our dry suits to dismantle the gear hut at Kildalkey Bay.
Greenpeace had taken ownership of Pelagic Australis, after 18 years of adventures in the Southern Ocean under the Pelagic Expeditions brand. We had little time to reflect during what was a tumultuous year and a half for us, let alone the world, but looking back on it now, we managed to cherry-pick our way through a pandemic and survive by grasping what could be construed as far-fetched projects given the time and place. Having good people on board and on shore was no less significant. All this underpins the value of small boats to get stuff done if you are willing to duck and dive through layers of bureaucracy, not to mention Southern Ocean weather systems.
In 18 months, from the start of the pandemic, during the swan song of Pelagic Australis, I had set foot on four of the South Sandwich Islands, on Gough, and on Marion. They were all new territory for me, which was a fitting and satisfying end to a great Pelagic story.
Pelagic Australis has been re-christened as Greenpeace’s Witness. 2
SKIP NOVAK
Best known for his participation in four Whitbread Round the World Races, Skip Novak continues to explore our world. Winner of the Blue Water Medal, CCA’s prestigious award that was given for years of voyaging to high latitudes, his expeditions continue to thrill. Skip joined Vinson of Antarctica, the Pelagic 77 he brought to fruition from concept to launch, and in July of 2021 completed Vinson’s first science expedition to Svalbard, supporting German geologists.
