Antarctica: How We Ended Up Going There
Mar. 2nd, 2024 03:50 pmOmaha and I attended a fundraising auction where a bidding war broke out between her and another participant, which ultimately led to my going swimming in the Antarctic sea off Hanusse Bay.
Omaha loves going to fundraisers, especially the auction type. I enjoy them, if not to the same degree. It’s Omaha who goes full steam ahead into the live auction and the bidding wars. Sometime last year we attended one such auction for the Youth Arts Program associated with the Fifth Avenue Theater, our local venue for Broadway-style productions.
As we walked the aisles during silent bidding, Omaha found the one item she had to have: “A cruise vacation for two to Antarctica on the Seabourn Pursuit.” The description said there would be a large staff of scientists on board. The starting bid was $1,000. Omaha asked, and I agreed, that going would be the trip of a lifetime, especially for a biologist and oceanographer like herself.
Silent bidding is where the bidders register their interest in items offered for sale. You walk along tables, reading descriptions and, if the item is small enough, seeing it there on the table, and make a bid on a card. If someone else wants it, they make a higher bid. The card typically has six or eight slots. and if the card is full when silent bidding ends, it goes to the full auction: the auctioneers know they have a bidding war on their hands, and they avoid putting up embarrassing failures no one wants.
The cruise went to full auction, current bid $12,000.
The bidding war for this trip became a frenzy. It came down to Omaha and one other person. Omaha kept looking at me with a hopeful look every time the other person bid, and I nodded and agonized and flinched as it went higher, and higher, and higher. We won. I won’t tell you the final price, but let’s just say it was about five months of my salary.
The good news is that we don’t have a lavish lifestyle. I could afford five month of salary. It would put us below the “one year’s worth of savings” line, but with some work I could make that up.
I had no idea what I was getting into. We were invited to a special party for the “big contributors” two weeks later, where I met one of the people on the trip. We learned that the price differential between what we’d paid and the retail price was tax-deductible. And the person who had put the piece up for auction said that the bid was so insanely high that he’d actually doubled our contribution to the arts fund and offered the other couple the same cruise (at a later date) for the price we’d paid, proceeds also going into the arts program.
I hate cruises. My memories of cruises consist of exactly two: a lovely memory when I was 11 years old of traveling around the Mediterranean with my parents on their marriage’s swansong, where they tried to find a place to reconcile, and a later cruise I made with some friends on one of those massive gambling vessels that heads out to international waters, turns on the casinos and sucks the cash out of your pockets. The latter was recent if pre-COVID, and the crowded, cigarette-laden, drunken air was more than I could bear especially since I don’t gamble. Despite my pleasure at being able to give Omaha something like this, I wasn’t looking forward to it. My impression of modern cruise lines is formed by the monstrous hotels-on-a-hull that park themselves in Puget Sound where I live, and the recent news of the launching of the Icon of the Seas, one such monster with cabins for 7,600 people, 40 bars and restaurants, a water park, seven swimming pools, 20 decks, 2350 crew, an acrobatic theater… I shudder to think of it all crammed into a seagoing hull. Comic book write Gail Simone describes cruises as “Golden Corral with a jacuzzi”, although add “… and norovirus” and that’s pretty much my mental image. Plus Covid and gods only know what else floating around… my 57-year-old immune system was already having an anxiety attack.
But we were promised that the Pursuit was not like that. She was a smaller vessel, intended for Arctic and Antarctic excursions, nothing like those commercial monsters at all. I accepted the statement at face value and decided I would go anyway, if only for Omaha’s sake.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
Because let’s just start with this. See those numbers for the Icon? Look at the staff-to-passenger ratio: 1 staffer for every 3 passengers. The Pursuit has room for 240 passengers. It has more crew members than that. It has only two eateries (a restaurant and a smorgasbord– it wouldn’t do to call it a “buffet”), a small cafe, and a lounge on the topmost ninth deck split forward and aft.
The Pursuit doesn’t have a water park (or even a single water slide). It doesn’t have separate independent “neighborhoods.” It’s a ship, not a whole highly walkable city in its own right on top of a seagoing hull.
What it does have is its own submarine.
What it is, at that moment and until May 2024 when the Queen Mary launches, is the single most luxurious cruise ship in the world.
I didn’t learn that last part until later, when I met the man who built her.
Omaha loves going to fundraisers, especially the auction type. I enjoy them, if not to the same degree. It’s Omaha who goes full steam ahead into the live auction and the bidding wars. Sometime last year we attended one such auction for the Youth Arts Program associated with the Fifth Avenue Theater, our local venue for Broadway-style productions.
As we walked the aisles during silent bidding, Omaha found the one item she had to have: “A cruise vacation for two to Antarctica on the Seabourn Pursuit.” The description said there would be a large staff of scientists on board. The starting bid was $1,000. Omaha asked, and I agreed, that going would be the trip of a lifetime, especially for a biologist and oceanographer like herself.
Silent bidding is where the bidders register their interest in items offered for sale. You walk along tables, reading descriptions and, if the item is small enough, seeing it there on the table, and make a bid on a card. If someone else wants it, they make a higher bid. The card typically has six or eight slots. and if the card is full when silent bidding ends, it goes to the full auction: the auctioneers know they have a bidding war on their hands, and they avoid putting up embarrassing failures no one wants.
The cruise went to full auction, current bid $12,000.
The bidding war for this trip became a frenzy. It came down to Omaha and one other person. Omaha kept looking at me with a hopeful look every time the other person bid, and I nodded and agonized and flinched as it went higher, and higher, and higher. We won. I won’t tell you the final price, but let’s just say it was about five months of my salary.
The good news is that we don’t have a lavish lifestyle. I could afford five month of salary. It would put us below the “one year’s worth of savings” line, but with some work I could make that up.
I had no idea what I was getting into. We were invited to a special party for the “big contributors” two weeks later, where I met one of the people on the trip. We learned that the price differential between what we’d paid and the retail price was tax-deductible. And the person who had put the piece up for auction said that the bid was so insanely high that he’d actually doubled our contribution to the arts fund and offered the other couple the same cruise (at a later date) for the price we’d paid, proceeds also going into the arts program.
I hate cruises. My memories of cruises consist of exactly two: a lovely memory when I was 11 years old of traveling around the Mediterranean with my parents on their marriage’s swansong, where they tried to find a place to reconcile, and a later cruise I made with some friends on one of those massive gambling vessels that heads out to international waters, turns on the casinos and sucks the cash out of your pockets. The latter was recent if pre-COVID, and the crowded, cigarette-laden, drunken air was more than I could bear especially since I don’t gamble. Despite my pleasure at being able to give Omaha something like this, I wasn’t looking forward to it. My impression of modern cruise lines is formed by the monstrous hotels-on-a-hull that park themselves in Puget Sound where I live, and the recent news of the launching of the Icon of the Seas, one such monster with cabins for 7,600 people, 40 bars and restaurants, a water park, seven swimming pools, 20 decks, 2350 crew, an acrobatic theater… I shudder to think of it all crammed into a seagoing hull. Comic book write Gail Simone describes cruises as “Golden Corral with a jacuzzi”, although add “… and norovirus” and that’s pretty much my mental image. Plus Covid and gods only know what else floating around… my 57-year-old immune system was already having an anxiety attack.
But we were promised that the Pursuit was not like that. She was a smaller vessel, intended for Arctic and Antarctic excursions, nothing like those commercial monsters at all. I accepted the statement at face value and decided I would go anyway, if only for Omaha’s sake.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
Because let’s just start with this. See those numbers for the Icon? Look at the staff-to-passenger ratio: 1 staffer for every 3 passengers. The Pursuit has room for 240 passengers. It has more crew members than that. It has only two eateries (a restaurant and a smorgasbord– it wouldn’t do to call it a “buffet”), a small cafe, and a lounge on the topmost ninth deck split forward and aft.
The Pursuit doesn’t have a water park (or even a single water slide). It doesn’t have separate independent “neighborhoods.” It’s a ship, not a whole highly walkable city in its own right on top of a seagoing hull.
What it does have is its own submarine.
What it is, at that moment and until May 2024 when the Queen Mary launches, is the single most luxurious cruise ship in the world.
I didn’t learn that last part until later, when I met the man who built her.
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