Claypole Jim - Living on the edge: a personal Antarctic story

For Jim

I went to the woods because I wished to live

deliberately, to front any essential facts of life,

and see if I could not learn what I had to teach,

and not, when I came to die to discover

that I had not lived.

H.D. Thoreau

I was cold and wet and lay crumpled in a heap like a rag doll dumped in the rain by a thoughtless child. The noises in my head seemed far away and somehow not important. I let the darkness wash over me again and closed my eyes.

I thought I heard Jim call my name. Struggling to focus, I could see he was standing near the companionway peering down at me anxiously. His hair was plastered against his head, his wet clothing hung heavily from his body and blood streaked his face.

The yacht was pitching and bucking wildly while being hammered by huge waves. The screaming of the wind through the rigging and the water washing over the cabin made it near impossible to hear what Jim was saying. Clearly a storm of horrific magnitude had blown up around us and Spirit of Sydney was battling massive seas.

Yvonne! Yvonne!

I tried to focus on Jims shape before me. I was disorientated and had no idea that I was slumped in the skippers bunk on the opposite side of the cabin, or that I was sharing it with an assortment of items that had flown out of lockers and landed around me. The large fire extinguisher that normally hung on the wall nearby was jammed between the head of the bunk and my head. If I had looked closely I would have seen bits of skin and hair stuck to one end of the cylinder- bits off my scalp!

Jim stood in icy salt water which lapped at his calves. He was still in his sleeping bag, although it had fallen to his knees and twisted around his legs. I felt irritated that he had forgotten to unzip and remove his bag before getting on his feet and that now it was all wet. I was about to tell him so when I noticed my Bill Bryson book was floating face down beside him, along with my pillow, toiletry bag and other sodden objects. I gathered then that Jim hadnt left our bunk voluntarily.

Yvonne, are you okay? he yelled, trying to step out of the mass of soggy fabric around his legs and steady himself against the thrashing movement of the yacht. He stumbled across to help me untangle my arms and legs. They seemed to be twisted beneath my body in the oddest of positions.

Youre bleeding, I gasped. The blood that smeared his face alarmed me as I looked for signs of injury. Its your blood, he said, steadying me in a sitting position on the edge of the bunk. Youve cut your head badly.

Dave and Andrew appeared, hanging on to a bulkhead to steady themselves as they sloshed through the water towards us. They peered down at me in the same concerned way that Jim had. Weve rolled, Jim told me. I could barely hear him through the loud ringing noises in my ears and the roaring of the storm. But were back up again and everythings okay.

Everythings okay! In a semi-conscious daze I glanced quickly around the cabin and looked back at Jim in disbelief. He couldnt be serious.

The place was a hell of a mess. The inside of the yacht looked like a war zone and was strewn with floating debris. The guys on watch out in the cockpit were half drowned and almost frozen and all of our electronic navigation gear had been knocked out. To top it all off we were just 290 nautical miles off the Antarctic coast, too far south to be reached by any rescue vessel, if we needed one, for days, possibly weeks. Who was he kidding? Everything was clearly far from okay!

The adrenalin and excitement had been building up on board as only hours earlier the force 12 storm of the screaming sixties pushed us before it. The winds had dramatically cranked up to 63 knots and all of a sudden the waves of the Southern Ocean changed, hurling us all over the place at will. Our 19 metre yacht was at the mercy of the weather and battling to survive the vicious seas of the high latitudes. Someone aptly described the monstrous seas that welled up around us as liquid mountains.

Jim and I were sailing north, returning to the civilised world after our year of isolation in Antarctica. Like us, the guys on board were getting more of a sailing adventure than they had bargained on and must have begun to question the sanity of their desire to sail the Southern Ocean. I was firmly convinced that this was not a great way to end our expedition. I was no longer living out my lifelong dream: somewhere, somehow, it had turned into my worst nightmare.