Chapter Seven - So Long & Thanks for all the Fish - April 2007
Bags packed, site all secured, gin all drunk, time to head for Blighty's green & pleasant pastures.
After five months it felt quite strange walking up the gang plank on to the JCR, god knows what it must be like for some of the BAS boffins who spend two years or so on base, as the lines were cast off the remaining winter crew, seventeen all told waved us off with a barrage of flares, they were actually pretty glad to see the back of us if truth be told, they could now get on with their winter jolly's with no one to bother them, firstly however they'd have to find the Jaffa cakes.
The skipper had decided not to take the normal route out, i.e. to go out into Marguerite Bay & around the Southern tip of Adelaide Island, but to go North up through Laubeuf Fjord, past Wyatt, Day, Hansen & Ljard Island's & on into Hanusse Bay. Talking to the crew it appears that this is not a route that they normally travel as generally the waters are ice locked, indeed the steward could only remember going through once before & that was at night. Fortunately for us we didn't need to back up & we cleared the gulch mid afternoon, it was pretty eerie really, like something out of H P Lovecraft novel, the silence was absolute & the views incredible, at the narrowest point the ship had to make some pretty nifty manoeuvers as it crept forward at a snails pace, it felt a bit like the scene in Jason & the Argonauts when they pass between the cliffs & they start to close in on them.
The waters were dead calm & the air crystal clear so most of us Morrison refugee's spent the best part of the day on deck watching Fur, Crabeater & Weddell Seals fleeing their icy perches as well as Minkie & Humpback's basking on the surface. All to soon however we left the calmer waters between the islands & headed into open water.
The next three days were relatively uneventful, if not tedious, the seas tossed us around a bit & several of the lads spent the best part of their time aboard being sick, their were many more whale sightings, mainly Minkie & Humpback but with occasional Orca as well as numerous albatross, petrels & other feathery hitchhikers.
I snoozed as we came in to view of FI but woke as we came in sight of Port Stanley, breakfast done we hung around whilst our passports were found & then wandered into town to take in the sights & delights of down town Stanley, several minutes later, no, only kidding, wandered about town for a couple of hours, sampled the delights of "The Victory Bar", watched the geese crapping every where & then walked down to Surf Cove to watch the dolphins before heading back to town for an "end of season" chow down.
The harbor at Stanley has to rate as one of the greatest graveyard of 19th century shipping in the world. Along its seven mile harbor front can be seen the hulks of twenty or ships that were beaten into submission by Cape Horn & never left the Falklands. They've even erected a sign-posted walk to view the wrecks including the East Indian "Jhelum" (built in 1839) and the North Atlantic packet ship "Charles Cooper" (the last US sailing packet to sail out of New York harbor & in the Islands since 1866) the best however is the "Lady Elizabeth" at the east end of the harbour, its some 230 feet long & you can still see its three masts.
Next morning we'd been told that there were problems with the flight home, the plane was broken & still in the UK so after a bit of souvenir shopping, me & Mr. Binney headed of on a little fishing trip, several happy hours were spent spinning on the Murrell for Brown Trout, the best catch of the day, not by me I might add, was a 14lb beauty caught by JT, we had it for tea that night, its was bloody gorgeous, mind you, not making any excuses, its bloody difficult when your trying to catch a whopper & there's a pair of bloody great Turkey Vultures sat on a rock behind you. Back at the ship we got the call that the plane was fixed & would be touching down at about midnight & flying back to the UK as soon as it had refueled.
So that about brings this story to a close, we flew at about 2.00pm from MPA so I didn't see FI from the air, stopped over at the Ascension Islands for fuel, bloody hot & landed at Brize Norton, Oxford 30 hours or so later, the taxi got lost & according to its Sat Nav I never made it back to Buxton so it must have been some other geezer knocking on the door in the wee small hours desperate for a cup of coffee.