Crew left no choice but to admit defeat

PADDY Barry, skipper of the sunken Tom Crean, captured the Irish Antarctic expedition's mood after yesterday's harrowing Southern Ocean rescue: "Well, it certainly enhances Sir Ernest Shackleton's achievement, doesn't it?"

Speaking shortly after the 23 foot lifeboat was scuttled, Barry described how the five crew members had survived three successive capsizes in freezing waters in a force 10 storm.

"We rolled, we rolled again and again. Each time we got the two pumps going, emptied the cabin of water, and kept up basic communication with the Pelagic [rescue yacht] on the VHF."

The first wave hit the wooden boat "like the belt of a hammer", the expedition's joint leader, Frank Nugent, said. It came as the vessel was hove to, with a drogue or sea anchor out to stop it swinging sideways to the mountainous seas. Winds were gusting 50 to 60 knots.

For two days before, the five exhausted crew had been weathering force eight and nine gales, with almost half of their passage from Elephant Island to South Georgia behind them - a journey they intend to continue in the rescue yacht, despite further bad forecasts.

"Then came this hydraulic knock that just flattened us," Nugent said. "It was a superb piece of seamanship by the others that kept us going. Not two hours later, we were flattened again. By a terrible belt. The Tom Crean just isn't built for a 40 footer in force 10."

Mike Barry, Everest mountaineer and Kerry restaurateur, said he was "fastest man out of a bunk" when the first "Bull of Bashan" hit the term used by Shackleton's navigator Frank Worsley for such seas in the original 1916 rescue voyage.

"We were all in the cabin, found ourselves hanging upside down, water everywhere," Mike Barry said. "I was like a greyhound out of a trap. It was a roller coaster trip, and a great introduction to sailing, but I didn't think I'd be taking up diving down here as well . . ."

Such is its geographical location that Antarctica can experience explosively rapid weather changes, with the strongest winds on the planet reaching up to 320km an hour when dense cold air rushes off the polar plateau to the coast.

A weather fax from the US indicating further low pressure bands sweeping in later this week forced the expedition to make "the only practical decision", according to Barry and Nugent.

"In fact, there was no decision," Barry said. "Count your children, they say, in situations like this. We have more bad weather ahead and it would have been imprudent to continue on the Crean.

"Yes, we are tired, subdued, a bit depressed, because with any break at all we would have got the Tom Crean to South Georgia. But it was a unanimous agreement, with various degrees of same, because we'd have done no favours to anyone to carry on," he said.

The 54 foot rescue yacht was within 10 miles of the tiny wooden boat, but it would be 14 hours after the last capsize before sea conditions could permit an approach. Climbing gear and electronic equipment was transferred in a heaving swell, and the vessel was scuttled to avoid any alarm being caused if it was discovered afloat and abandoned.

"It was on the edge stuff," said Mike Barry, who has been within sight of Everest's summit on the successful 1993 Irish mountaineering expedition to its north face.

"Your stomach was up around you. But we'd have gone to the South Pole before we would even have reached shelter in the South Orkneys. It was like that."

In particularly subdued humour yesterday was Jarlath Cunnane, Mayo sailor and construction manager who oversaw the construction of the Tom Crean - a replica of the original James Caird used in the Shackleton voyage - in a Co Kilkenny yard.

"I'm ... a bit sad," Cunnane said simply. "We had no choice in the end. It would have been foolish to go on."

"We weighed everything up, and it was just unaccountably rough," said Jamie Young, transatlantic sailor, Cape Horn canoeist and director of Killary Lodge adventure centre in Co Galway. "We lost a boat, but we are sticking out the expedition to try and attain our other objectives as far as we can.

"We're relieved now that we made the right decision."