The Land of Pure Silence | Continent 7: Antarctica

We've got a waypoint for the position of the ship. We'll probably go out of visual range, but we'll stay in radio contact and just kind of check in wherever we see anything or as we pass by landmarks. You need to have a reference point to be able to say where you are relative to it if you're trying to use landmarks to navigate, something like the mountains or the rocks. We're constantly trying to remember where we are because you're literally in a life raft, and if anything went wrong, it would be bad.

His last time out, Ari managed to place a video tag on a humpback whale, a 66,000 lb beast. But today, he's hunting minke whales, and even in a known feeding ground, they're harder to spot, weighing about 45,000 lb less than humpbacks.

"What's that over there? Get still. Ice? Is it okay? Not much visibility. It's cold, but it's pretty hard to spot a whale. The further away than a few hundred meters, the minke whales are a lot more challenging because they're smaller, they're faster, and they don't surface nearly as high. They're a real pain to work with because they're difficult to see, and generally, you see them once or twice, and then they're gone."

The horizontal visibility is pretty low. Even with the minky, they surface so low and they're so small, you can only see them from a couple hundred meters. But you can probably hear the blow from, you know, two or three times farther. So what I might do is I might shut down for a little bit, you know, 5 minutes, and just kind of have a listen. I shut us down, so we'll do that.

My most favorite times in the Antarctic are when you can remove all of the human sounds, and it's a silence that you can kind of feel. It seems kind of primitive. You hear ice crackling, you hear glaciers rumbling, you hear seals barking. When you can hear your heartbeat, you know that it's quiet. Keep your eyes and ears open. If you hear a little blow, that's a minky whale.