When our trip ashore to Brown Bluff got cancelled, the crew added a visit to the ship’s Bridge to take its place. I would have preferred to go to Brown Bluff, but at least we had another event to take its place. The bridge and the captain are the nerve center of the ship.

The highlight of the bridge visit was a conversation between a quite elderly woman passenger and the captain. It went like this:

Passenger: How do you tell where the icebergs are so you don’t hit them?

Captain: We watch for them.

Passenger: NO, I mean how do you tell exactly where they are?

Captain: We just look.

Passenger: With what?

Captain: Our eyes. We just use our eyesight.

Passenger (looking extremely alarmed): But you must use sonar or radar or GPS or something to be able to know where they are?

Captain: No, just our eyesight. We do use binoculars sometimes of course.

Passenger: You must use more than just eyesight. What do you do at night?

Captain: We have three spotlights on the ship that we shine out to see where the icebergs are at night.

Passenger (looking exponentially more alarmed – as were we all): That just can’t be right. You mean you don’t have any radar or sonar or satellite photos or anything?

Captain: The only thing like that we use is satellite photos. But in Antarctica, it’s frequently overcast for weeks at a time, so our satellite photos might be two weeks old. Of course, the really big icebergs move very slowly so satellite photos still give us some idea of them being in the vicinity, just not exactly where they show on the dated satellite screen.

Passenger: (looking ready to keel over): But Captain, what about at night in a big storm and blizzard conditions like we’ve experienced?

Captain: We just use more eyes.

Passenger: What do you mean?

Captain: I bring more crew members up to the bridge so I have more people watching for icebergs in really bad conditions.

My personal thought at that point was no wonder a ship sank down here two months ago and our ship pulled the people out of the water.

This photo is the captain on the bridge. You can see our view of the ocean and icebergs right behind him. (Very clear view, right?)

This photo is the satellite screen on the bridge. The yellow dots are the big icebergs, the white dots are smaller icebergs, etc.

Also, the captain added that we hadn’t seen any really large icebergs yet on this trip. He said they did see one two weeks ago that was 32 miles long. He also said that we still weren’t to the area where the really big icebergs are generally located.

ANTARCTIC QUIZ.

Here’s a quiz question for you. After learning that the only way our ship was avoiding hitting icebergs was by our ship’s crew “keeping a sharp eye”, Vicky and I promptly did which of the following?

A. Went to the 7th deck bar and ordered a round of Harvey Wallbanger cocktails.

B. Went below, got our binoculars and went to the front of the 5th deck to help the crew to “keep a sharp eye out”.

C. Said to heck with it all and went to the back of the 6th deck and went hot tubbing.