(Jan 9-12, 2026)
It was a partly to mostly sunny morning with almost no wind when I got up, and I could feel a little extra energy on the boat. More faces than usual gathered in the galley by 07:15, waiting for our first helicopter operations meeting on the bridge. There was eager anticipation that we might put the hot-water drill camp out on the ice today.
I went up to the bridge around 07:30 to take a look outside. A layer of wispy clouds hovered in the general direction of the desired camp location. I had a feeling Dan and Dom—our Kiwi helicopter pilots—were seeing the same thing. Dom looked at me and said, “Sucker hole,” and I nodded. I worked with Dom one previous season, and he’s flown with our group for several more. He’s been flying helicopters in Antarctica for a long time. He can get things done—but he’s also perfectly willing to say no when his instincts tell him it’s a bad idea.
“Mostly” sunny turned out to be an important qualifier. Flying helicopters over vast expanses of Antarctic ice is tricky. Pilots can lose visual reference quickly when both the sky and the ground are white. It’s a hard problem to explain to the uninitiated: The weather is objectively nice—why can’t we fly? But you really don’t want to be in that helicopter if the pilot can’t see.
Dom handled the meeting with some grace, communicating the problem clearly to the British and Korean decision-makers. He ultimately agreed to attempt some reconnaissance throughout the day, first with a drone, then with the helicopter. Hope was alive, but expectations were tempered. The media contingent—Miles O’Brien and Raymond from the New York Times—seemed a bit baffled by what had just transpired. They were about to learn.
On the second afternoon, Dom managed to land exactly once at the site with Taff, Jinsuk, and Choon Ki (two field safety guides and a Korean scientist). They surveyed the area for crevasses and deemed it safe—important progress. Unfortunately, when the clouds rolled in, neither helicopter could land to deliver additional people and gear for camp, or to retrieve them. They ended up stuck on the ice for eight hours before Dom finally “rescued” them around 9 p.m. It made for good drama in the media, but in reality they were fine. Taff is an experienced field guide and former dirtbag climber. Jinsuk has led expeditions in the Himalaya. I’d wager neither would mind spending the night out there. The bigger concern was the prospect of leaving them for multiple nights. The forecast was getting tricky, and they only had food for a day or two.
Two days came and went, with helicopter operations proceeding in fits and starts. One flight lasted about as long as it took me to go upstairs and brush my teeth before they returned. Another time, a sling load actually made it into the air—only to be returned to the helideck fifteen minutes later. Nothing remotely resembling a weather window sufficient for forty-five round trip flights materialized. We needed wind and colder air to clear out the low clouds. It never came.
Our team filled this time by doing extra testing on our radar equipment and assembling our booms—three cylindrical tubes about a foot in diameter and seventeen feet long that hold the antennas. Eventually these will be suspended below the helicopters which currently sat idly on the deck. It was something to do. At night we played ping pong, Jason’s new favorite pastime. He’s become mildly obsessed and surprisingly good, though he hates playing me. I’m not especially skilled, but I have a natural left-handed slice that’s hard for him to return. One evening he described it as “the fish gut soup of ping pong.”
For the unindoctrinated, “fish gut soup” is an inside joke among the western scientists related to food on the ship—and since the science is stuck in a holding pattern, it feels like a worthy digression. The galley on the Araon has a well-equipped commercial kitchen feeding roughly eighty souls. The staff is Korean, and unsurprisingly, so is most of the cuisine.
For the most part, I love the food. It can be like a greatest-hits album of spicy Asian dishes: bibimbap, pork kimchi stew, ramen, pho, stir-fries—all excellent. We especially look forward to Saturday Korean BBQ nights. We don’t measure time in weeks, but in BBQs (this past Saturday was number three of nine). Electric grills at each table sizzle with pork, beef, marinated short ribs, kimchi, and vegetables. Add cans of Cass and Hite (the Korean equivalents of Coors and Budweiser), plus the smoke from the griddles, and the galley briefly transforms into a hazy, Korean-spiced social scene.
Occasionally the chefs throw us a bone with western-inspired fare, though often in unexpected combinations. One lunch featured T-bone steaks, spaghetti bolognese, and quesadillas with guacamole and salsa. I joked to the Brits and Americans at my table that we were probably being buttered up for fish gut soup that evening. Fish gut soup hadn’t appeared on the menu just yet, and I knew it was only a matter of time.
There are moments in life when you’re right about something but wish you weren’t. Dinner at 5 p.m. that day was one of them.
Fish gut soup is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like. It’s almost universally disliked by the westerners onboard. You’re served a clay bowl of bony fish chunks and seemingly arbitrary organs floating in a spicy broth. The broth itself is flavorful, but most of us pick around the solids and compensate with a larger-than-usual serving of rice.
Chang Lee, the New York Times photographer and a native Korean, sat across from me that evening. As we discussed the menu, he explained that fish gut soup is something of a delicacy in Korea—and that the “arbitrary” organs are anything but. They are cod fish genitals. Both sexes. I finished my rice and silently hoped there was ice cream in the freezer.
This was the first encounter with fish gut soup for Jason, Jesse, and several others—and the origin of Jason’s ping-pong metaphor. At the moment, the menu also feels like a fitting analogy for Antarctic fieldwork: bursts of excitement are T-bone steaks and BBQs. But the waiting around is the fish gut soup of field science.
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