Footsore team considers picking up a penguin to celebrate glacial trek

"I THINK I'd rather be at sea!" The words of one exhausted member of the Irish Antarctic Expedition in South Georgia on completing the infamous Shackleton mountain traverse.

Nursing "a quartet of busted heels" and one broken rib, four members of the expedition reached the former South Georgian whaling station of Stromness at 1.30 p.m. Irish time on Tuesday, after a 50 hour trek across hazardous glacial terrain.

The four joint leaders Paddy Barry and Frank Nugent, Mike Barry and Jamie Young - had left the western King Haakon Bay on Sunday morning to take advantage of a brief break in hostile Antarctic weather.

Whereas the original rescue group carried hoosh (a thick soup), three biscuits and Streimer's nut food in Burberry socks strung round their necks back in 1916, the four Irishmen retracing their bootsteps bore 65lb packs.

"We'd have stuck to socks, only we couldn't find any quipped Mike Barry, the Kerry mountaineer and restaurateur, speaking by satellite phone from Stromness. His admiration for that original trio, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Captain Frank Worsley and fellow Kerryman Tom Crean, had risen "even further, if that's possible".

Crossing the glacier named after Tom "The Pole" was the worst part of the journey, said mountaineer Frank Nugent. "It's an evil glacier. We had to pick our way over it, and wrecked our feet. Technically, however, we coped very well and we would have finished a good 18 hours earlier if we had not encountered a river in spate up at the last stage in Fortuna Bay."

In a valiant attempt to cross the river, Paddy Barry stripped and was let out on a rope. But the current was too great and he soaked his gear. "This was definitely not part of my mountain plan."

Jamie Young, the fourth member of the group, said he intended to keep his feet firmly planted on deck in future. Three capsizes in the Southern Ocean were easier than this, in his view.

"It is good to have done it, we all supported each other very well, but I seemed to fall over more than the others and cracked a rib. Which means I can't laugh very much." Young sighed.

The expedition's two bottles of champagne - stowed in the ill fated lifeboat, Tom Crean, before it was abandoned after the capsizes late last month - were due to be cracked open last night. "The downside is that our celebration is going to be a bit limited. Just ourselves look at ourselves all over again," Paddy Barry said. "God, we'd nearly be driven to asking the penguins if they would like to party."

The Irish Antarctic Expedition's daily log can be reached through sponsor Esat Digifone at (086) 8119970, phoning from anywhere in Ireland for the price of a local call.