Wind, Fire, and Ice: The Perils of a Coast Guard Icebreaker in Antarctica

Product Description

Between 1955 and 1987, the United States Coast Guard Cutter Glacier was the largest and most powerful icebreaker in the free world. Consequently, it was often given the most difficult and dangerous Antarctic missions. This is the dramatic first-person account of its most legendary voyage. In 1970, the author was the Chief Medical Officer on the Glacier when it became trapped deep in the Weddell Sea, pressured by 100 miles of wind-blown icepack. Glacier was beset within seventy miles of where Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was imprisoned in 1915. His stout wooden ship succumbed to the crushing pressure of the infamous Weddell Sea pack ice and sank, leading to an unbelievable two-year saga of hardship, heroism and survival. The sailors aboard the Glacier feared they would suffer Shackleton’s fate, or one even worse. Freakishly good luck eventually saved the Glacier from destruction, but the story is told as the author, who was not part of the chain of command, experienced it. More imminent threats later occurred involving a three-hour inferno, as well as eight-story waves that drove the ship to the brink of disaster. Wind, Fire, and Ice is the story about a physician fresh-out-of-internship who naïvely assumes he is going to have an easy assignment and see numerous exotic ports. Instead, he experiences adventures and adversities beyond his imagination, as well as jarring conflicts with an obsessed captain.

Review

A brilliant slice of Polar history. Written by Dr Robert Bunes, the ships doctor on board of the icebreaker Glacier in the early 70s, he takes the reader on a journey into the icy waters of Antarctica. There his ship, ‘the largest, toughest and most powerful icebreaker in the free world, is besieged in the ice pack of the Weddell sea. Ironically this modern wonder of power is stuck exactly in the same location where Shacklton’s Endurance was crushed. Bunes does a fine job documenting the past history of ships that entered Antarctic’s ice pack and what happen in these socially isolated conditions where leadership is stretched to its very limits and often snaps. –Will Steger, world famous Polar explorer
A tour of duty on an icebreaker bound for Antarctica, after stopping at a number of exotic ports, sounds like an easy travel adventure to the young doctor, Bob Bunes. He reports for duty with a paisley surfboard, a set of skis, and high hopes, only to find a ship with no medical supplies and inadequate equipment, eventually headed for the Weddell Sea, and what Sir Earnest Shackleton called “the worst part of the worst ocean on earth.”
The weight of having ultimate medical responsibility for a 200-man crew in the most remote part of the world hits the doctor like a tsunami wave. Nothing in his training prepares him for a host of medical emergencies he later faces, like preforming surgery on a violently tossing ship or resuscitating a sailor in the middle of a massive shipboard fire.
A collision with an immovable ice mountain tears a gash in the side of the ship and makes the vessel all the more vulnerable when it is later confronted with hurricane-force winds that flatten the vessel or wind-driven ice that imprisons the ship and threatens to crush it.
The ship-captain’s obsession with retrieving a set of oceanographic buoys and his last-ditch efforts at becoming an admiral leads to perilous lapses in his judgement. As the danger mounts, the doctor and the captain move ever closer to open conflict over the welfare of the crew.
This riveting true-life tale of crisis and adventure grips the reader from the first page to the last. The extreme conditions of the Antarctic are vividly drawn, as is the fragility and tenacity of human life in the face of unimaginably stark circumstances. A must-read!
—Ellen Keigh, author of Streets of Silver

“Fresh out of his internship and hoping to see the world, Dr. Robert Bunes, signs up for a seven-month cruise on a Coast Guard icebreaker. What fo