Naomi Petersen

3rd Mate

Imagine being on a huge orange skateboard that can ride up blocks of ice as big as a car, slew sideways, pivot, and nose-dive back down. That’s what it can feel like at the helm of Aurora Australis and is the most unusual experience of my ship's officer's life. It is most dramatic at night under the big spotlights. It sometimes appears as if the ice leads are tiny shallow creeks in a rugged white wasteland, a very odd feeling when in a 3900 ton ship. We sweep the dimly lit ice with spotlights and search for patterns on the radar that indicate wider smoother rivers through the ice.

I spent a summer down amongst the icebergs 2 years ago, working for Greenpeace, looking for the Japanese Whaling Fleet. I became an iceberg ‘addict’, though the distribution of icebergs is not uniform in the Southern Ocean and there are far fewer where we are now. I didn’t appreciate then how complex Sea Ice is, but I certainly experienced how beautiful it can be. I had been a ship’s officer for several years on a P&O container ship based out of New Zealand, but moved to Tasmania once I had gained recognition for my qualifications in Australia. I first went to sea for Greenpeace in 1973, sailing to Muroroa Atoll to protest French nuclear testing. I’ve basically worked at sea ever since.