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Re: In the Heart of the Sea
Posted By: jlmann In Response To: Re: In the Heart of the Sea (King)
Date: Monday, 5-23-16, at 1:57 a.m.
Some of Ernest Shackleton's "South" is good reading , even if it is a bit dry and technical at times. Those guys were made of tougher stuff , "The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration" was brutal business , and they made attempts for the poles with equipment that was pitiful by today's standards. Shackleton lost the Endurance to sea ice , and ended up sailing a reinforced 20' lifeboat (painted with seal blood!!) 5 or 600 nautical miles from Elephant Island to a whaling station on South Georgia. If I recall correctly. It's a big book , so I skipped some of it , but it's amazing any of them made it back , and I think they only lost three men.
I saw a picture a while back of an area on Everest where quite a few that didn't survive are laid to rest. It's like an open air burial/mummification , and they are frozen in place. I think it said the original few that were left there were caught in a storm first , then got left behind because at that altitude , the air is so thin that the remaining party members didn't have enough strength to try to rescue them ,and the sick ones knew they'd never make it back and told the healthy ones to try for the summit. I think after they made the summit , they stopped to check on the others , but they had passed , and besides being to weak to try to recover them , their party decided it would be an honor for them to be left on the mountain. I'm not sure if altitude sickness is anything like "the bends" that divers get or not , but either would be a heck of a bad way to go. Crazy stuff. There are tons of people climbing it now , compared to back then , so much so that trash and litter were becoming a problem. I guess it must be big business for the Sherpa guides , and they have the routes and camps all figured out so that they can get as many as possible to the top during their short season? Everything on my bucket list is still warm , sandy , and near sea level...
Anyway , hope all are doing well! I have been ridiculously busy here lately , and it's rained just about every day this month , but I've still managed to catch a few decent smallmouth , one really nice largemouth plus a bunch of smaller bass and crappie so far. I heard the slot sized pups have been doing pretty good down around Buxton , so I'm gonna try for a trip down soon and maybe another in Sept/Oct. Looking forward to everybody's reports , I'm thinking it's gonna be a good year!
Tight lines
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