Letters
Skip Novak’s article on the South Sandwich Islands in Yachting World’s
June 2020 issue is one of the first articles I have ever seen [on the islands].
But I did want him to know that there have been more of us to get to the South Sandwich Islands than you know. In the early 1990s, I was on a two month Antarctic journey on the Kapitan Klebnikov, giving us rare opportunities to go to places few have been. One of them was the South Sandwich Islands.
Even being a passenger on the largest icebreaker in the Antarctic, to get to this arc of volcanic islands was not to be easy. The ice that year was 10ft thick and noone had been even close for many years. The Russian captain was uneasy about making it.
The most memorable were the islands with no safe landing or climbing spots. We went in by helicopter. On Zavodovski, the volcano was smoking, the ground itself was hard lava, making a fall not only a possibility but potentially dangerous as this was the very end of nowhere. We jumped only when necessary to pass over a hardened lava crevasse.
When the call was made to come back to the helicopter, a few of us didn’t want to leave. We were mesmerised by the island, its penguins and its volcano that seemed ready to go off.
But the weather was turning quickly
– it would be touch-and-go as a whiteout was making the world disappear as we took off. The windshield was fogged, and the helicopter pilot was navigating by hanging out the side window as we descended the cliff edge (when we could even see it) toward the sea. But there was no sea. No one spoke. Only later did we understand that the pilot was trying to get beneath the ‘white’ to just above sea level without going into the sea itself. And then, finding our ship in the white-out was another challenge altogether.
Joan Larsen, Chicago
In this issue another adventurer, round the world sailor Nick Moloney, visits the South Sandwich Islands en route to Antarctica – see page 44.
The Hip Joint mystery solved
We had several readers answering the call from Geoffrey Ransby to find the yacht Hip Joint, which his son built in 2001.
I refer to the letter from Geoffrey Ransby titled ‘In search of Hip Joint’ published in the October issue of Yachting World.
I’m pretty sure that the yacht he refers to, now known as Per Mare, is berthed on the river pontoon moorings in Haslar Creek. She’s to be found just off Haslar Marina moored astern of a 1980s two-tonner with a blue hull.
Richard Hart