Apologies to all our followers for the delay in uploading posts to the Blog and also photos to the gallery. Internet coverage has been non-existant for the past few days and only this evening (Thursday 28th) became available again in fits and starts. The problems are blamed by the crew on poor satellite coverage and “other technical issues”. We have manged to get a few posts up but even that has been a tedious business with the connection dropping out every couple of minutes. We have also had to use one of the ship’s computers instead of our own tablets on which all the outstanding blogs have been written. The ones we have put up tonight have had to be retyped in order to copy them over. There are also a lot of photos resized for the web and ready to go but the connection simply isn’t strong enough to handle them at the moment. We are promised that things will improve when we reach South Georgia. That will be in about 24 hours time. We are currently making about 14 knots and I am guessing about 400 miles from Grytviken on South Georgia.
We passed close to Elephant Island this morning and could view it about 10 miles distant in the mist. We must have seen it much as Shackleton and his men would have seen it from their open boat more than 100 years ago. To them it was a blessed refuge; to us it was a poignant reminder of the courage, bravery and immense strength of that epic band of explorers. It is nonetheless humbling to be travelling now in those same waters that Shackleton navigated in the James Caird. As the Fram tosses on a lively sea in pitch darkness, it is a reminder of what a truly heroic feat of navigation that was.
So stay in touch, loyal readers, and we will bring the Blog up to date as soon as possible with details of our exploits over the past few days – and indeed in the days to come.