Feb 25th - Last day, skiing and skinny dipping

Position: 64 19' South 62 59' West, Melchior Islands, anchored before
crossing the Drake Passage

Chris here: This may well be our last blog from Antarctica as the weather forecast for the Drake Passage looks favourable and Steve the skipper has indicated that we may well start our journey across the worst seas in the world this evening or tomorrow morning. We have anchored for dinner and Steve will decide after dinner whether to set off or wait. This may sound odd as we may well be back in South America 5 or 6 days ahead of schedule.
However, we have to take account of weather and look for good weather windows to cross the Drake Passage.

This morning was a late breakfast and as the weather was fine this was frustrating for me personally as my knee felt better and I was desperate to get out and do something. The guides were keen to have a quiet day but once everyone else was awake we had a team discussion and decided that everyone was keen to do something on our last day here. We planned to look for a
beach where some could watch penguins and the rest of us could go for a ski tour. We soon found the ideal spot on Ronge Island, bolted down and early lunch and readied our kit. Tamsin the chef cum physiotherapist strapped my knee to minimise the risk of any further injury. Murray, the first mate/engineer of the Evohe accompanied us for the skiing expedition. Murray is a "character" and I mean that in the nicest possible way. He has brought with him cross country skis which are 30 years old, allied with his leather boots, wool jumper, old fashioned long johns, beard and cheeky grin he looks like he belongs to the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. The only incongruous item are his extremely up to date mirror ski goggles. It was great to have Murray with us as he is invariably cheerful.

We set off through a Gentoo penguin colony as ever moving carefully to minimise disturbance. A difficult climb up the first proper terminal moraine we have seen brought us to red snow where we started skinning up the glacier. Today we were not roped up - actually this was bizarre as there were some very deep crevasses but we managed to cross safely skiing up to a col at 510 metres. Skiing down from here was great in perfect corn snow.
Mark Sedon explained to us that anyone who crossed anyone else's tracks would owe them a beer. The result was great set of turns down a virgin slope side by side. Except!......Murray was having trouble with his antique skis and crossed everyone's tracks several times - we forgave him the fine on account of his antique skis.

The descent through the crevassed area at the bottom of the glacier was simple except when crossing one particularly deep crevasse which was about one foot wide at the top, Alan decided to jump the crevasse, unfortunately he mistimed the jump and managed to chip off a section of the lip which widened the crevasse for those following. Everyone crossed safely and
finished our last few turns through red snow, coloured by algae.

A short walk through the penguin colony brought us to our last dinghy ride back to the Evohe. On arrival, Mark Bryan, Arne, Al and I decided that as the weather was so nice we should have a swim before we left Antarctica. We were persuaded to jump in to the almost freezing water (1.2 degrees Celsius) naked - skinny dipping. We were in the water for a very short period of
time but found it "invigorating" and a fun way to finish our time in Antarctica.

It's now after dinner and Steve has decided that we will set sail tomorrow at 6 am for Puerto Williams in Chile. Given our experience of seasickness on the way down, you may not be hearing from Al or I for the next few days depending on how rough the Drake passage proves to be. We will be asking for a couple of guest writers to keep the blog going and give their impressions of our trip to this fascinating continent.