My first time in a zodiac in Antarctica felt a little daunting. I stood on a platform at the back of our sturdy ship and looked at the rubber boat bobbing up and down on the waves. A crew member held out their hand to steady me in a sailor’s grip and help me step as confidently as I could into the craft. Looking around at my fellow passengers as I sat down, I don’t think I was the only one who was wondering how the experience would unfold. But within a day we all felt like masters, shuffling our way along the side of the boat to get comfortable and making sure our hats and hoods were ready for the inevitable spray from the waves.
Getting into a zodiac quickly became the moment I looked forward to the most on my trip. They’re fundamental to experiencing Antarctica up close. They offered up some of my most treasured memories from my trip, including an icy encounter with the continent’s deep history.
Wildlife encounters
The low, open profile of a zodiac makes it the perfect platform for wildlife watching. Antarctica’s wildlife is famously unafraid of humans, and possibly even looks at us with a little side eye as we try to manoeuvre around its home turf with a distinct lack of elegance. You can be as amused as you like watching a penguin waddle along on the land, but when they’re zipping past you in the water they’re another thing altogether. I was amazed to see them swim in formation, effortlessly porpoising beside my zodiac with bodies as sleek as torpedoes. After showing us their best, they would take a breather and gently bob up and down in rafts, dipping their faces in the water as if to cool off and remind us of who was the boss here.
Unless a leopard seal turned up of course. In Mikkelsen Harbour we had just completed a landing and were heading back to the ship when one turned up to investigate us. On ice floes they had looked self-satisfied as they yawned and let us snap away on our cameras from just a few metres away. But in the water leopard seals are utterly transformed. This one snaked around us with complete poise. In one moment it was all sinuous turns just below the surface, and the next moment it would turn and stick its immense doglike head out of the water to contemplate us with a stiff look. We were very happy to be too big to be on the day’s menu.
At Stromness Harbour in South Georgia, the male fur seals were packed so densely on the beach that shoreline safaris in a zodiac were the only safe option. Cruising along the shore was a fantastic experience, listening to them bark and jostle as they staked a few square metres of ground for their breeding territory and blithely ignoring the gangs of gentoo penguins walking between them on their way to their own rookery.
At one point, a bull elephant seal longer than our craft decided to take a dip and crashed into the waves at shocking speed just a dozen metres away from our zodiac, forcing our guide to put the boat into sharp reverse. It was well worth being taken by surprise for, on land these immense seals look bloated and even moth-eaten, but in the water they were transformed into something else completely. Not quite elegant, but a sturdy and dynamic animal that flashed its flippers before disappearing out to sea.
Iceberg graveyards
For all the wildlife however, my favourite activity was a uniquely polar one, quietly skimming through the ice. On the ship, icebergs were things to keep your distance from, but in a zodiac we could explore the bays where they had washed up and become stranded. Every colour of blue imaginable was on display, in a parade of surreal shapes from mutant ice cream cones and brutalist statues.
In places, we could approach incredibly close and look through the water to see the ice below the surface, in shades of teal and turquoise before disappearing into the depths.
Elsewhere, it was the brash ice that enchanted me. Our guide cut the engines so we could drift through it and listen to the glassy tinkling sound it made as it brushed along the side of the boat. Some of it was pack ice left over from the winter, but other parts were chunks of iceberg – younger ice than the ancient glacier ice we picked up later. If we held our breath, we could hear it pop and crackle: the sound of Antarctic air a century or more old, quietly sharing its secrets with us.
Other ice was even more extraordinary. We wrestled one chunk into the zodiac and passed it around with gloved hands. Its surface was completely covered in gentle ripples, but what made it so extraordinary was that it was as clear as a piece of crystal glass. There wasn’t an air bubble to be seen inside it, and not a hint of colour or cloudiness. This was no mere ice cube. It wasn’t even a piece of frozen sea, left over from the last melting pack ice of winter. It was a piece of glacier ice that had had all the air forced out of it by extreme compression over thousands of years. After making its slow but inevitable way from the heart of Antarctica to the sea, it had calved from an ice cliff and been slowly worn down by the waves. Only our passing boat had saved it from melting into nothingness. An hour later it sat on the bar of our expedition cruise ship like an art installation, to be chipped into fragments to give our drinks an extra polar frisson. It was a transient souvenir from Antarctica, but an equally powerful reminder of why zodiac cruises are at the heart of every great Antarctic experience.
I had never anticipated that such tiny encounters could be so powerful. I trailed my fingers in the water for a second before the cold got the better of me and I put my gloves back on. The guide fired the outboard motor back up and we swung around and started to head back to the ship, carrying our wondrous piece of glacial ice, destined to sit on the bar of our expedition cruise ship like an art installation and be chipped into fragments to give our drinks an extra polar frisson.
Across the trip, we’d had incredible wildlife encounters by zodiac, but now it had delivered us a piece of ice of almost unimaginable age – the most transient and magical souvenir possible. For me, this got to the very essence of what makes them such amazing boats, the power to help forge a connection with the very essence of Antarctica.
*
