Polar Bird 12th November 2001
After seemingly endless preparations, training and waiting we finally pulled away from Macquarie No.4 wharf
in Hobart on a grizzly and damp Monday evening at just after 9 p.m. The day had been spent dodging several heavy bouts of rain which had deluged this otherwise charming and cosy Tasmanian city, buying postcards, making phone calls and doing safety drills on ship. Some winterers aboard would be going away for 15 months and a few of us were wondering what sort of world thay would be coming back to in 2003, with the heady events afflicting the world since September 11th. The ship broke the festoon of streamers with ease.
The Polar Bird is an infamous ship for all sorts of reasons. The ship, a polar resupply vessel built in Germany in 1984 has been in the service of ANARE for many years, undergoing name changes along the way (originally the Ice Bird) and is now chartered from a Norwegian company. Our compliment was chockers with only one spare berth out of 94 berths. The cabins are closed knit affairs, mostly holding 4, with separate WCs and showers on the lower 'B' deck. The mess hall underneath is particularly crowded, but the bar further down below looked interesting, if quiet. The Polar Bird is notorious for rolling heavily at sea due to it's special rounded hull design to break ice. Last year a helicopter crashed on the deck and several years before 4 choppers were turned into omlettes by a Force 12 + gale causing the mountings on one chopper to come loose and .... Stories from veterans were quite alarming, with sea-sickness, body damage after being thrown around corridors onto the ship's organs.
Well, we sailed gently down the Derwent with a big sounding of the horn, seeing the fairy-tale lights of Hobart, Wrest Point Casino, and Battery Point fade away for the last time for three months. No dramas so far. My cabin mates in B10 are Gerard and Martin from the German coring crew, and Doug Thost a glaciologist from ANTDIV who had been down south many times before and was telling us all the good war tales of sailing in the Southern Ocean. I applied a Scopoderm patch behind my ear-hole and called it quits for the night. So far so good, sea nice and calm !
Position at 23:47 local time (UT +11hr) S 43°16'25" E 147°29'29"
45km SSE of Hobart
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