The Falklands War

I was not able to visit the Falkland Islands on my trip to Antarctica. We were several hundred miles away. After 25 years I had forgotten much of what we saw on television during the Falklands war. I was therefore very interested when I received a telephone call this evening. My friend thought that I would be interested in the
The Archive Hour on Radio 4 at 8 o'clock as it would be about the Falklands War. Unfortunately we were having our supper at 8 and so after supper I went to the Radio 4 site and the Listen Again for the Archive Hour
This programme is most interesting as you can hear the original radio broadcasts to the Falkland islanders as the war was happening, Rex Hunt, the Governor who had to leave the islands and the radio presenter Patrick Watts.
"Michael Nicholson recalls the night of the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 with the help of some astonishing radio archive from the Falkland Island Broadcasting Service. When radio station manager Patrick Watts turned up to present his weekly 60-minute music request show, the programme turned into a marathon 16-hour broadcast as islanders phoned in with their sightings of the invading army."
You can listen again to The Archive Hour for the whole of next week. I hope that you will find that by clicking on this link, you can open up your radio player.

A Video from Antarctica

I was able to experiment with the video setting on my digital camera. With a memory card of only 256Mb the videos that I could take were very short. We crossed the Antarctic Circle at 66 degrees south and here is my first video of our party at 69 degrees 32 minutes south, a record for the ship that was made possible because there was less pack ice in the sea in King George VI Sound this year.
Inside the Antarctic circle there is 24-hour daylight at some time during the year. As we were only just inside the circle after the summer solstice, we missed the 24-hour daylight but the pack ice was still melting a bit. We were able to travel further south than the party which was there a fortnight previously.

You can click on Antarctica Video to see and hear my first efforts on Google Video.

Sally's Antarctic Blog

As we travelled down the Antarctic Peninsula, we heard that there was a BBC South crew on a ship in the Antarctic. They had joined a Royal Naval ice survey ship, HMS Endurance. We had been watching a film about what was perhaps the greatest survival story of all time, the 1915 story of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton who managed to escape in a lifeboat, when his ship also called the Endurance broke up in the ice. We had been sailing near Elephant Island in the north of the peninsula.

I did not make any posts on my blog site while we were in the Antarctic as we had very limited Internet facilities. However it was very interesting to find Sally's Antarctic Blog and to see what can be done with the support of the BBC. Sally had to make her broadcasts. There was a personal touch in her blog as she wrote "Another successful live broadcast into South Today … what a relief!"

Sally had to land on an iceberg with her cameraman to take her pictures. In the picture above it is just possible to see them on the iceberg. In Sally's Antarctic Blog, you will be able to see more pictures including an enlarged one, which shows how enormous the iceberg was. You will also find some 60 pictures on the BBC South site.

I have managed to post some 20 pictures on my site and I hope that I will be able to add some further pictures from others on the Professor Molchanov with our party. The BBC blog provides a good model to aim at. In the Professor Molchanov we travelled further south and crossed the Antarctic Circle and of course we saw a Ross Seal. (as it jumped off the icefloe)

A rare event in the Antarctic Peninsula

Sorry for the long break but I have just returned from an expedition to Antarctica.

I will now try to make regular posts during the next month.

One of the most exciting moments of the trip was the sighting of a Ross seal in St Marguerite's Bay near the Antarctic Circle. Ross seals normally live in parts of the continent where ships are unable to penetrate the ice and so they are seldom seem. In any case they do not live on the western side of the peninsula.

What was this seal doing miles away from home across the peninsula? The master of the ship was so excited that he called another ship on the radio and told the master that he was unable to explain to his passengers how rare the sighting was. Here is my picture of the Ross seal and you can see my first selection of pictures from the Antarctic on line Picasaweb or at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/geoffrey.boys