Looking back at your trip to Antarctica 16 years later, what were some of the main highlights that still come to mind?
I think it’s pretty much the ultimate adventure. As far as the three of us in our family go, it’s pretty much as far as we can go into the unknown within our capabilities. The family element of it was huge, doing something like that with part of the family is not something that a lot of people get to experience, and I’ve since had a lot of people commenting on my video saying that they wish they had the chance to do something like that with their father or family. Basically, in terms of the actual voyage, it was just an awesome trip, with awesome experiences, and we met some of the best people.
How cold did it get? What did you do to warm the cabin?
Put it this way, our water tanks all froze, every time we washed anything, it froze (inside). We had to keep a jerry can of water on the bench next to the stove where we did all our cooking, just to stop it from freezing. The biggest issue with the water was when it started to thaw out on the way home, huge chunks of ice were banging around inside the tank under the bunk. Temperature wise it was about zero at chest height, above that it was 2 degrees, at floor level it was below zero. We had a diesel heater but because we were so limited with space, we only used it once when we wanted to dry some clothes, which failed. The other thing was because the tanks were frozen, we had to collect water from a lake with 5cm of ice on the top of it, with the lake being up a hill! Even stuff like Olive Oil solidifies under 10 degrees, there were just lots of little things like that you never think about.
Every couple of years we see awe-inspiring footage of IMOCAS and Volvo 65’s down in the Southern Ocean. How would you describe sailing in the deep south to the average yachtie? Did sailing south from civilization feel a bit like stepping off the edge of the planet?
Yeah, it does feel a lot like that, because pretty much every other ocean voyage we had done was from land to other land, in terms of what we recognize as being land. When you go down there you kind of have a totally different mental image, you know you’re going to arrive at icebergs and pack ice before you even get to land, and you might not even get to the land on the other side. In terms of the sailing, there’s an element of fear involved, you pretty much set off knowing that at some point you’ll get rolled by horrendous weather, especially in a slow, plodding boat like ours. My feeling anyway was that once we got going and were in the rhythm of it going south, it was essentially like any other trip, just getting colder and colder every day.
You had the opportunity to visit Mawson’s Hut, which is almost as they left it when they walked out the door over 100 years ago. How did you find that experience?
It was eye-opening for me, because I’d never been exposed to the history of Antarctic exploration as it wasn’t well known in NZ. It was a bit like a moon landing type story where you hear it but can’t quite relate to it. It was a bit like sailing to the moon and being like “oh, here we are”. In terms of the hut itself, it is literally exactly as they left it, there’s even clothes hanging on hooks and food on shelves. The insight you would get into the way they lived was incredible. I went back to work as a carpenter as part of a restoration project a few years later, me and another guy took all the measurements of every piece of timber for the replica that later got built in Hobart. We were crawling under bunks measuring stuff, I probably know that hut as well as anyone alive. (Matt was originally a Carpenter and now works as an Aviation Firefighter).