Time: 0900 hours

Month/Year: March 2024

Location: South Georgia, Antarctica, 54°17'07.0"S 36°29'57.6"W

Temperature: Water Temperature: 35ºF / 1.7ºC

The words “South Georgia” didn’t mean much to me for most of my life, but now they have become all-consuming. South Georgia Island is a special place that resets your expectations for what “Life” can accomplish at the extremes.

Standing proudly just beyond the Antarctic convergence, this 106-by-22-mile isolated island hosts towering, jagged horns that stand watch over the ice rivers pouring from their faces into frigid-but-never-frozen waters that serve as an opulent pantry to the area’s astounding populations of seabirds and marine mammals. It was these latter, the elephant and fur seals, and the whales, that drew first the British then the Norwegians for the abundant blubber to be mined here.

On shore at the village of Grytviken are the rusty remains of its former life as a whaling station: try pots, whaling ships and processing plants—an overwhelming amount of equipment necessary to make human survival and industry feasible in these harshest of conditions. South Georgia and its surrounding seas have tested many, creating legendary figures out of those who prevailed.

After all, I’m diving for the guests aboard National Geographic Endurance, named for the fateful ship that brought Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew to Antarctica and on into history. His epic tale of yearlong survival on the pack ice involved escape across the Drake Passage in a lifeboat and ultimate salvation by a pioneering overland crossing of South Georgia to whaling station Stromness. In fact, Shackleton’s grave site is just over there, some hundred yards from my Zodiac…

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I snap back from my scenic reverie and remember my current predicament. Nothing heroic within any reasonable historical context, but to my individual experience, it’s up there: I’m gearing up for what is about to be the most remote and coldest dive of my life.

OK: Ready to roll… Splash!

Surrounded by bergy bits and giant kelp fronds, 3,000 psi on my back and thousands of dollars of kit from head to hands to document this next submersion in an unimaginable world, the 35-degree ice cream headache comes with a moment of pure endorphin-rushed clarity.

I descend into the murky water full of glacial runoff to an old pier piling. A big smile stretches across my lips: Sea spiders, nudibranchs, colorful sponges, tunicates, tubeworms, ophiuroids and crinoids and asteroids, cucumbers, limpets, isopods, stalked jellies and giant kelp — all my favorite things, here in one place, helping me to forget how much my hands hurt. My equalization tubes—narrow silicone ducts that allow air to flow between my drysuit and dry gloves—have become dislodged, shrink-wrapping my fingers in the icy water and neutralizing my hand warmer’s effectiveness. For an hour my hands empathize with olives in a martini glass—Shackleton wouldn’t have been deterred. I emerge furious at my capillary refill and ecstatic for the experience.

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At this moment, it’s impossible not to think back on that first pool session during my PADI Open Water Diver course, where I flailed in the warm clear water, over-breathing in awe at my instructor’s effortless buoyancy. I’d wanted to be a marine biologist since I was 5, but once I visited my first kelp forest and stood proudly on the beach with that cert card, the path was clear. Cert after cert, wetsuit to drysuit, baby camera to my camera baby, diving has taken me further than I even knew one could go and allowed me to witness things that few ever will. Whether it’s tropical reefs, wrecks, cenotes, megafauna, critters, blue water, green water—or in my case, freezing hands screaming behind a camera as I take one more shot of these sea critts that have given my time on this little water world its purpose. Thanks, Ocean, and thank you, diving. Now let’s go take that next photo!