Sounds exciting!
It was. I learned a great deal about leadership that trip. The Captain was P.R. Taylor. Icebreaker sailor his entire life. The Senior Enlisted was BMCM Giblin, who while color-blind, had sailed on breakers his entire career.
P.R.’s thing in the Arctic was to dress in a big penguin suit and have his picture taken up there. It was his only quirk, and later I found out he had older kids who were about to give him grandkids.
He’d take the pictures and send them home with a letter that asked, ‘Do polar bears eat penguins?’ Polar bears are only found in the North, not the South, so the answer is no. As such, he was the only penguin in the Arctic.
Before Polar Star, I thought narwahls were a myth. I actually saw them. Makes me believe that perhaps there may have been unicorns. Also found out that Antarctica had a working nuclear reactor in the 50’s. Just near McMurdo Bay. It’s still on the nautical charts we had at the time.
The best thing about it was being at sea. You just go and go without stoppping, for thousands of miles, 17 or so miles per hour. The swells made the sea hilly, like the kind of low rolling hills you’d see just east of a large western mountain range once you got into ag country. I saw some of those hills in Missouri too. Look out to the side of the car while you are driving and it looked like green sea swells with their motion frozen.
Before I went to sea, it was hard for me to differentiate between waves and swells. The Southern Ocean put all that to rest forever. It’s the only part of the Earth with no land mass breaking up the band of water all the way around the globe. The swells just build on each other, and on top of that the storms are just humbling.