Sea birds, like this juvenile albatross often trail the ship.

The SA Agulhas has a strengthened hull to sail throught the ice fields closer to the Antarctica

We left Cape Town a day ago and I’m starting to get used to life on the ship (yes, it’s a ship – don’t make the mistake of calling it a boat).

I’m sharing cabin 20 with three other people. To get to my bunk, I have to clamber over a mountain of gear. The cabin has an en suite bathroom the size of a voting booth, with a toilet, shower and basin – if you aim well, you can pretty much do all you need to do standing in one place.

Life on board is punctuated by meal times: breakfast at 7.30am, lunch at 11.30am, dinner at 6.30pm. Right now my brain is about to shut down after a four-course dinner of macaroni and cheese, a seafood platter, chocolate cake dunked in Ultramel and a plate of cheese and biscuits.

When you’re not eating, your leisure options are fairly limited. You can read in your bunk, watch sea birds from the back deck or watch a movie on the big television screen in the passenger lounge.

Annie Proulx describes it best in The Shipping News: “The smell of sea damp and paint, boiled coffee. Nor any escape from the static snarled in the public address speakers, gunfire in the movie lounge.”

She’s right about the gunfire. Every movie screened seems to involve Steven Seagal and exploding planes.

The engine noise is constant but comforting, a reminder that we’re slowly getting closer to Marion. Each day the sun will rise a little bit earlier and set a little later, and in two days we’ll turn the clocks one hour ahead.

On the ship with us is the Deputy Minister of Public Works, Henrietta Bogopane-Zulu, who will officially open the new research station. It’s her 40th birthday today and there’s a smorgasbord of cakes and samoosas in the passenger lounge to celebrate. As if we haven’t eaten enough!

A cat pelt is pegged to the wall in the bar at the old base, called TheTit and Fanny. The new bar is yet to be christened.

It’s cold and bleak. It’s my fourth day on the ship and we’re now in the notorious Roaring Forties, the name given to the strong westerly winds that blow between the latitudes of 40 and 49 degrees south.

Wandering albatrosses have started to appear – colossal creatures with hooked beaks. It’s mesmerising to watch them ride the air currents above the breaking waves.

There are some fascinating people on board who have been giving talks to pass the time. Today’s highlight was Johan “JR” van der Merwe’s talk about the year he spent at the South African research base in Antarctica in 1969, where he worked as a junior meteorological observer, aka metkassie.

It looked rough. The base was buried under 12m of ice and snow – to get in you had to climb down a narrow tunnel beneath a hatch. And the temperature in the underground long drop was -12ºC!

I’m not the kind of person who could stand on the pack ice and watch a ship sailing off, knowing it would only be back in a year. JR is different. He told me that when he saw the ship again the following year, he just wanted it to deliver more beer and bugger off.

Marion Island also has its fair share of stories. On the 1948/49 annexation voyage, five cats were brought to the island to catch mice that came over with the sealers in the 1800s. Unfortunately not all the cats were female, as was originally thought…

By 1977 there were more than 3000 cats on the island, killing 450000 sea birds a year. Something had to be done.

The cat extermination days on Marion are the stuff of legend. The cat population was decimated by deliberately introducing cat flu, but in 1983 there were still about 600 remaining.

Each of those cats was hunted down individually and shot. Only the photos remain: sinewy young men standing in the snow, their beards encrusted with ice, shotgun aloft in the one hand, limp bundles of fur in the other, their eyes as hard and distant as the eyes of soldiers.

Later today the mastermind behind the extermination programme, Professor Marthan Bester, is going to tell us more.

Two passengers on the SA Agulhas chat to each other on the helicopter deck. That beast of an aircraft is a Russian-built Kamov, operated by Titan Helicopters.

The average year-round temperature on Marion is about 5 ºC and the island is battered by winds of up to 140km/h. One minute it’s sunny, the next it’s snowing. There is no safe place for a ship to berth, so everything is flown across to the island via helicopter. The orange structure is the new research station.

It’s been a frustrating day. At 5.30am this morning I climbed to the monkey deck for a glimpse of the island at first light. But there was no first light, nor was there an island to be seen. The sky was dark, sleet was pelting down and the wind was gusting at more than 120km/h.

Eventually I spotted the island – a black slash on the horizon – but I didn’t linger on the deck for fear of being blown overboard.

The sun came out a bit later and the island was lit up in shades of burnt orange, green and black. White waves slammed against the shore and the tallest peaks were dusted with snow.

Because of the sheer cliffs there’s no safe place for the Agulhas to dock. The ship anchors offshore and everything – people and cargo – is flown across by helicopter.

However, the wind hasn’t abated, which means the helicopters can’t fly. The construction crew members were meant to fly across at 8am and we were supposed to go on a cruise around Prince Edward Island. Media and other guests were to fly to the island tomorrow morning. But those plans have been dashed. Imagine if we get this far and we can’t get onto the island!

So we sit and wait. I spent about an hour in the finger-numbing cold taking photos of southern giant petrels, which have eerie, pale eyes. I’ve drunk lots of tea and walked the corridors of the ship.

On the flip side, we’re experiencing the Southern Ocean in all its glory. It wouldn’t be right if the sea were flat as the Vaal Dam and we could walk around in T-shirts.

We’re still on the Agulhas and we’re all going a bit crazy.

Yesterday afternoon the wind suddenly abated and the big Russian Kamov helicopter lifted off the back deck with a roar and ferried back and forth between the island and the ship, transporting the construction team and crates filled with last-minute building materials, furniture and provisions for the new research station.

Fully loaded, the Kamov can lift five tonnes.There’s no room for error – watching the helicopter in action is like watching a surgical procedure.

he weather held and this morning it was calm and clear, but for some reason no one was taken across. Now a squall is rocking the ship and the island has disappeared in the rain. The wind is up to 80km/h and there’s no way the helicopter will fly.

We’re bound to a very tight schedule and every hour we spend on the ship is an hour less we can spend on the island. We stand against the railings, looking forlornly at the mountains coming and going in the mist, counting those hours that we’ve lost.

In a way it’s like an endless Kulula delay. You wait for something to happen even though you secretly know you’ll be spending a long time doing nothing. Or like telling a child on Christmas day that he can’t open his presents… until further notice.

On the plus side, we did a short tour along the coast this morning. What appeared to be barren areas of white sand turned into colonies of thousands and thousands of penguins. They swam up to the ship, poked their heads out and brayed at us. The sea was so clear, so blue, so cold. Killer-whale sea.

Marion is a volcanic island. The earliest dated eruptions took place about 450 000 years ago and the most recent occurred in 1980. It’s a stiff, two-hour climb to the summit of Junior’s Kop, a low cinder cone behind the base.

Field assistants Hugh Purdon (left) and Tristan Scott (right) work with seals, gathering data for the scientists. They’re hardcore; don’t mess with them.

At last! After a week cooped up on the ship, we finally flew across to the island this morning. Boarding the chopper on the back deck of the ship, ducking low, I felt like I was in a Black Label commercial. Less than a minute in the air and we were on the other side.

On the island we were greeted by a crowd of bearded people – the members of the 67th Marion Island Overwintering Team (or Marion 67). It was like a conference of Kingsley Holgates.

Considering the remoteness of the island and the hostility of the climate, the research station is something the construction and engineering teams can be proud of. It’s a modular design, with various blocks coming off a central hub – the science block, technical centre, accommodation block and living area. To get between the blocks you walk through clear tunnels suspended off the ground; it feels like a human-sized hamster playpen.

The Marion 67 team has it good. Flat-screen TVs, wireless Internet, high ceilings, spacious bathrooms, new labs and a glassed-in braai area with views of the coast.

They’re grateful, although many were a little sad to move across from the old base. There’s history there: the cat skins in the bar, the roof tied down with ratchet straps, floor dented by hundreds of pairs of gumboots, labs where PhDs were completed, baskets hanging outside windows where you kept your beer.

The new station is top-class, but it’s new. It will take some getting used to.

The one thing that I find strange, however, is the lack of eco-friendly power. We were told that solar power wasn’t an option because there are only three to four hours of sunshine per day on Marion – on a good day – and upright wind generators couldn’t be used because their spinning blades might kill the birds. But given the island’s abundance of wind and water energy, and no shortage of scientists around, surely something more could have been done?

Instead, a Perkins diesel generator runs day and night, fed from tanks that store a whopping 380000 litres of fuel.

On arrival we were allocated beds in the rooms of Marion 67 team members. I got paired up with Tristan Scott. Tristan has long blonde hair and a scraggly blonde beard, and he’s a fan of Megadeth. He works with seals, gathering data for the scientists.

The sealers are the most hardcore people on the island. Tristan told me how he was thrown about like a chew toy when a three-tonne elephant seal came up behind him and grabbed him by his backpack.

They go out every day, in rain, wind or snow, hiking to remote parts of the island to check tags and monitor numbers. Tristan has a seal tag in his ear that he fitted himself.

After a tour of the station we went for a walk to Trypot Beach, so named because of the huge cast-iron pot used by a different kind of sealer in days gone by – to boil blubber, I think. We set off in the rain, in gumboots, waterproof pants, waterproof jackets and gloves, our cameras wrapped in plastic bags.

The island is predominantly made up of mires: spongy, soggy patches of earth. Walking through a mire is like walking on a jumping castle. You bounce and squelch along, often sinking calf-deep.

Along the way we stopped at the grave of a man called Joseph Daniels, a guano collector from the St Helena Bay area who was part of the original annexation voyage.

He was the first South African to die on the island, after the boat he was in capsized. Not much more is known about him. The deputy minister made a speech in the rain – about paying the ultimate price and the bias of history. Daniels wasn’t a ship’s captain or a scientist, but this doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be remembered.

On the way back to the base (she didn’t carry on to Trypot), the deputy minister sank in a mire and lost her boot. She would never venture outside again.

There’s a colony of king penguins at Trypot Beach. Mercifully, when we got there, the rain stopped for five minutes so we could take pictures of the inquisitive birds modelling their crisp tuxedos and yellow cravats. Then the weather closed in again and we hiked back to the base into a needling, wet wind, barely looking up from the ground.

When we landed at the base this morning, us journalists were installed in the conference room, which has Internet access. That’s where I am now, typing away, while a fierce storm rages outside.

I can also hear the thin strains of Kurt Darren’s “Kaptein” leaking up from the bar downstairs. There’s a serious party going on. The islanders don’t often see fresh faces and we’re being treated like celebrities.

If I don’t go down there now someone is going to come get me.

The king penguin is the second-biggest species of penguin in the world, smaller only than the emperor penguin. An adult stands nearly a metre tall and can weigh as much as 16 kg. Here, one shakes the drizzle from its feathers.

Marion Island harbours one of the most important breeding colonies of wandering albatross in the world. Populations of these magnificent birds have been decimated by unscrupulous fishing practices. These three birds are engaged in a courtship dance, with the SA Agulhas moored offshore in the background.

Argh. Like sheepish schoolboys we gathered in the dining area at 7am after three hours’ sleep and sat bleary-eyed over a cold fry-up, most of us muttering that we’d never drink again.

The storm passed in the night and today the weather was crisp and sunny. After breakfast we stumbled out of the base, gulping water like we’d been lost in the Sahara for a few days. By the time we reached Ship’s Cove, a picturesque bay 3km from the base, the cool, unpolluted air had cured most hangovers.

The leader of our walk was Linda Clokie, an ex-dolphin trainer from Bayworld in PE, now working with sea birds. She’s addicted to Marion: It’s her third time on the island.

At Ship’s Cove we sat at the edge of the grass-covered cliffs, above thousands of king penguins on the beach below, watching sooty albatrosses waddle from their nests, unfurl their wings and lift off into the sky.

I could have stayed there for the whole day, but after half an hour Linda checked her watch. She gave an apologetic shrug. A place like Ship’s Cove spills its secrets slowly; you need time to appreciate it. And we were out of time.

This afternoon I joined Linda again on a hike to the summit of Junior’s Kop, a volcanic cinder cone behind the base. The mountain looked deceptively close, but it was a long, hard squelch through the mires, which eventually gave way to red and black lava on the slopes. It took us two hours to reach the summit.

I’ll never forget the view of the wild interior of Marion from that high vantage point: mountains piled one of top of each other, patches of snow, lava courses coming down like black tears, rivers and waterfalls glinting in the sun. We drank from the crater lake at the top – clear to the bottom – and sat
for a while just taking it in.

If you look at a map of Marion, I’ve seen maybe a thousandth of it.

This morning the wind was up again, there were strange clouds in the sky like oversize UFOs and the sea was a mess of whitecaps. No way the helicopters could fly. We were elated – maybe we’d get to stay an extra day!

At 10am we managed to nip out for an hour to look at two elephant seals on a nearby beach: gigantic creatures with red mouths, snotty noses, flippers with surprisingly dainty nails, able to dive more than a kilometre deep in water that would freeze if it wasn’t salty.

Then the radio crackled: The helicopter was about to take off. I had mixed emotions about leaving the island. I’m not sure I’d sign up for an entire year, but two days is the other extreme. We’d barely arrived.

You have to be a particular kind of person to live and work on Marion. For many, a year on the island is a way to escape the pressures of everyday life and to live in a fantasy world with like-minded people. No one cares if you look like a Viking, what music you listen to or if there’s a hole in the elbow of your jacket. Windswept, ruddy, drunk on history and ritual, many would stay there forever if
they could.

We walked along the cargo deck to the helipad at the end, a tunnel of people to say goodbye to, shaking hands, exchanging e-mail addresses. Then, hunched over in the Kamov, assaulted by noise, we lifted off and in less than a minute we were back on the Agulhas.

I sat on the monkey deck this afternoon with binoculars as the ship chugged away, watching the base get smaller and smaller until it was obscured by mist. A few minutes later and the world was water again, the island gone too.