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Expedition Dispatches
A Narrow Escape from a Seal Attack Thursday, February 17, 2000
 The Team's Call from the Antarctic Peninsula LISTEN: [RealPlayer] [Windows Media]
Download a FREE media player to listen.Hello Mountain Zone, this is Hans Saari calling for the Antarctic Climb and Cruise Expedition. Today we've had yet another fantastic day. In the morning we went on a whale watching and iceberg climbing session. Stephen Koch was hot to climb the iceberg so we found a good mooring, let him off, and he began to climb up. Seemed like a fairly casual iceberg. Some unexpected things happened. A seal, a super aggressive seal, came in and was mock attacking the boat – flashing it – and waiting for Stephen to fall off as he traversed out and Chris was taking photos which led to a pretty intense conclusion as Stephen walked back down a gradual slope, the Leopard seal was trying to make its way up and attack him. In any case, Stephen made a dive into the boat and escaped unharmed. After an incredible lunch, once again, we headed out to ski the north face of Mt. Mariah which turned out to be a fantastic ski descent – 2,100 feet all the way down to the ocean. We encountered high winds up high...but had absolutely stellar conditions…corn snow all the way back down to the boat. The Zodiac met us and as we headed back towards the Akademik, we encountered a Humpback whale, an absolutely enormous Humpback whale which circled around our little dinghy. Both showing its nose and flashing its tail for 15 to 20 minutes. We returned to the Academik drenched, once again, in whiteout conditions. This is the fourth day that we skied, in a row, where we've encountered snow, rain and minimal visibility. Tomorrow looks to be similar conditions but we have our eyes set on a 3,000-foot couloir, which splits the face of a mountain, which is south of Mount Scott. It looks to be both challenging and technical and we will be attempting to send digital photos. Once again, we have been having numerous technical difficulties with both the dispatches and photos, but we'll do our best to keep everybody updated. Let me give you some of the statistics: Temperature: 33 degrees F, windspeed - 25 degrees out of the east, Humidity 84%, altitude - 0, but the high point for today was 2,138 feet. Hours of daylight - we're still looking at 18 hours of daylight which has been nice...giving us a lot of leeway. We can sleep in and still do our skiing and whale watching. Barometric pressure - 986.2, GPS 65.11 degrees latitude, 64 degrees longitude. Right now were in the Verdansky Bay and everybody's super psyched. Like I said, after today, which was a pretty moderate but fun ski descent, we have our eyes set on a pretty ambitious goal for tomorrow. We'll see how that goes, looks to be pretty steep and we'll do our best. But in any case, we'll keep you posted. Goodbye. —Hans Saari, MountainZone.com Corespondent
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