Where white towers seem to pierce the polar sky

ICE BLINK, they call it. A luminous white monster beckons beyond a ship's bow. If over cast, it resembles a threatening dark mass. Close up, it may only be a baby berg forming fantastical mirages on the southern polar horizon.

Whales in the sky. Ships sailing upside down. Sworn reports from early explorers may have a good scientific basis in these latitudes. Sir Ernest Shackleton even recorded false sunrises and sunsets in 1914, caused by light passing through atmospheric layers at different temperatures and densities.

Creeping through thick mist down the berg strewn west coast of the Antarctic peninsula yesterday, the Russian crew on of fata morgana. It is known to occur most frequently when the summer sun is low in the sky around midnight, one of the officers told me.

Like the mountaineer's Brocken Spectre, magic white towers appear to pierce the sky, due to warm air layers over open pools of sea.

Stay up on deck as I might this week, I won't catch a glimpse of the Aurora Australis, the southern lights. Temperatures may be sub zero, but this summer time. The evanescent phenomenon is only sighted during the Antarctic winter, a long night that lasts more than 90 days. Some observers have even claimed that the lights "sing" which may be explained by an intensely electrified atmosphere.

What we have witnessed on the Professor Mokhanov has been lustrous white tabular bergs, wandering for years after breaking off the polar cap.

Some of these growlers can behave as if they had brains, the former US navy correspondent, Thomas Henry, noted in 1947 when he recounted how four US navy ships were trapped in the Antarctic Bay of Whales by a "million ton" leviathan which moved independently of wind and current, as such bergs are wont to do.

Undersea streams are the main propelling force. These spectacular forms, some as big as Ben Bulben, are sculptured by the elements, but ignore wind and tide.

It is the sort of ice that the Professor Molchanov encountered on its last voyage south, earlier this month when a berg, exploded on the port bow and threw the ship off course temporarily with a tidal wave. In 40 years at sea, its Murmansk master, Capt Vitaly Repin, said he had not seen the like. It is also the sort of ice that helped to destroy Shackleton's ship, Endurance, in November 1915, not far from where we have just been.

Having left the South Aris Irish Antarctic Adventure up north on King George Island three days ago, where it was waiting for a break in the weather to set sail for Elephant Island, the Russian vessel set a course for the Weddell Sea.

Named after the British navigator who discovered the then most southern latitude in 1823, the Weddell is the Endurance's graveyard. Shackleton's crew floated on broken pack ice, before launching three lifeboats and making for Elephant Island to the north east in April 1916.

Bound for there now, the Irish expedition has been fighting off a mounting sense of frustration. Yesterday morning the south westerly wind direction was just right, but there was far too much of it, according to co skipper, Paddy Barry. "It is blowing Force 7 in the bay here, and Force 9 outside," he said. "Our inclination is to go, but we are still cogitating."

On the rescue yacht Pelagic, the ship's library is being delved into at a furious pace.

The Irish Times is also providing some diversion A hand line made up by the skipper of the Dun Laoghaire yacht, Gulliper, was hand delivered by this reporter this week. Copies of the newspaper came also. And fiendish seamanship tasks have been devised.

One such task involved a detailed examination of the ballast in the 23 foot Tom Crean. The original Shackleton lifeboat, James Caird, carried 15 cwt of shingle in canvas bags and another 5 cwt of larger stones. The Tom Crean has been weighted with one tonne of redundant plastic computer mice, courtesy of a Galway scrap merchant.

Ah, but how exactly how many mice, The Irish Times wanted to know for the record. Jamie Young was dispatched below, and came up with 9,546.

Even as they wait to weigh anchor, the seven Irish, supported by US yachtsman Skip Novak and his two professional crew, have become cult figures on the Professor Molchanov, where twice daily contact is being maintained by HF radio.

A Croat mathematician, Peter Petocz, ho is part of a Sydney University group studying Antarctic wildlife, has been playing the Derry Air on a recorder in solidarity and there has been a screening of the original Hurlez/Worsley film of the Shackleton rescue on this ship's video.

Comparisons are also being drawn by those Australians on board with their own Antarctic adventurer, Sir Douglas Mawson.

Unlike Shackleton, who never lost a man, Mawson lost team members when they were poisoned by dog livers they were forced to eat.