I'm flying, Jack! I'm flying!

Yesterday my name was drawn out of a hat, along with two hundred others, for the opportunity to take a short cruise on the US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Sea. Try saying that three times fast. I actually have to -- several times daily. As part of my job, we keep in regular radio contact with the ships in our area and at this means hailing them on the HF radio by their full Christian name, “US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Sea, US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Sea, this is Mac Ops” and so on.
It took some maneuvering to get out of the pier, but once we made it out into the turning basin the crew opened her up and we set off down the open channel of water toward the ice edge. The skies were cloudy in the morning, hanging like a low ceiling over the ice shelf and the surrounding mountains. The water was flat gunmetal grey. We, the tourists, lined the edges of every available deck space and scanned the water up ahead for any signs of life. Of course, there were plenty of seals, humping along like super fat inch-worms along the sea ice and occasionally poking their curious heads up out of the water. And we passed two lone Adelie penguins. But this crowd was unimpressed. Finally tall sprays of water were spotted a few hundred feet in front of the boat and we responded with a chorus of “oooh!”. Cameras emerged. This was a small pod of Minke whales, maybe about five or six in all. They moved in slow motion, leisurely rolling giant glossy backs and dorsal fins out of the water and sinking slowly back under. Two swam under the bow and were spotted again on the side called “port”. They were vividly clear at about two meters below the surface. All too soon, we had to go back. In order to turn around in the relatively narrow channel, the ship had to drive up onto the sea ice on one side of the channel and then reverse out the other way. Think about making a three point turn on a narrow street. There is something strange about a boat that is designed to tear into solid ice like this. I had to laugh at one Skua that remained seated on the ice, directly in the path of the oncoming boat. We drove up on the ice and it disappeared under the bow. A murmur passed through the onlookers when it didn’t fly out from either side, we were certain it had lost the battle of wills against the boat. But as we backed out into the channel, there it was, in the same spot, looking defiant. My friend Andrew said, “It’s the Tiananmen Square skua”.

Tiananmen Skua vs the Red Army