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| Iceberg that looks a bit like a cat or a dog. |
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| Another iceberg that's tumbled in the water. |
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| The Ocean Endeavour. |
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| It's not that obvious in this photo but that Intrepid logo isn't straight. |
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| Cuverville Island. Ice arch on the right. |
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| View from the beach on Cuverville Island. |
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| I struggle to hold the camera straight at the best of times, but in a rocking Zodiac it was extra-challenging. |
This set of views spans two days - the end of the day on Pléneau Island, and the next morning on Cuverville Island. One of the photos shows the view while we wait our turn to get back onboard the Ocean Endeavour. You can see the gantries that we had to sidle up to and hopefully this illustrates the boarding process I described in reverse in an earlier post. I also mentioned that the Intrepid logo was lopsided. I wasn't the only one to notice it. Apparently it is repainted every year, as after cruising the Antarctic during its summer, the ship then spends the other half of the year cruising around Canada. It is operated by a different company there, so it stops in Portugal where alongside general maintenance it is repainted. I guess they were in a hurry last time.
This seems a good time to get into the Ocean Endeavour in more detail. It was our home for 13 days and outside of Zodiac excursions there was nowhere else to go. It's fair to say that we got to know it well.
At first glance, you may be forgiven for thinking that this polar cruising vessel was serving the purpose it was designed for. However you would be wrong because it actually started life as a Soviet car ferry running between Leningrad, Riga and Helsinki in 1981. There is still evidence of its history. The large door for cars at the stern has been welded shut but is still visible. And some warning indicators on the bridge still label some of the decks as car decks.
At this point it was called the Konstantin Simonov. Its later history gets complicated and although the internet is surprisingly good at giving information on what is after all a relatively obscure vessel, I've had to patch things together as best as I can. One of the crew gave an excellent lecture on the ship's history one evening. She had worked on it many times and had grown quite attached to it, a feeling I can sympathise with. I should have taken notes.
Anyway, here goes. It remained in service in the Baltic Sea until 1996, although in 1992 with the collapse of the Soviet Union the ship was transferred to the Baltic Line. It also was refit in 1988. In 1996 it was renamed the Francesca and was intended to operate around Australia, but the deal fell through and so the Francesca was laid up in Germany until 2000. I don't know much about ships but that strikes me as a long time to be laid up, so perhaps it was very lucky that it found a new lease of life under the name of The Iris, operating as a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. Although Wikipedia says it was operating as the Francesca in the Med from 1996, but I don't believe it.*
After that it was refit and changed operator to Kristina Cruises. The Kristina Katarina was still cruising around the med and continued to do so until it had a fairly radical change of purpose to an ice-rated vessel in 2014. It was then that it became the Ocean Endeavour and began operating in Antarctica and Canada.
It's currently operated by Intrepid in the Antarctic, which is why it has their name painted wonkily on the side. Before that however it was operated by Quark Expeditions, another of the big tour operators in the region. In 2015 the ship was damaged when it struck ice. Nobody was hurt but the ship had to return to Ushuaia for inspection and repairs. In a way it was good to know this, as like the house in The World According to Garp it had been pre-disastered.
There is another piece of evidence of the ship's history, and one which got me wondering about it in the first place. At the fore of the dining room, the walls are covered with ceremonial plaques given to the ship on arrival in various ports. Why, I wondered, were so many of them for a ship with a different name? Well, now I know. And so do you.
Bonus selection of digital 3D and 2D shots on Flickr
* I'm indebted to this site for most of my info. It predates the ship being named the Ocean Endeavour and I'm inclined to believe it over wikipedia on the grounds that it was written closer to the time of events:
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