My hands are frozen to the wheel, I'm wedged into the cockpit at an angle of 45 degrees and my shoulders ache. I've been on watch for 20 minutes. One hour and 40 minutes to go. Three pairs of gloves, four layers of thermals, and a fetching set of foul weather gear that makes me look like Bob the Builder is all that stands between me and hypothermia. I'm alone in the middle of the Southern Ocean, at the helm of a 71ft ketch. Fernande was originally built for racing but converted for chartering by a man who wanted people to be able to "tiptoe round Antarctica" in a way that's just impossible for the cruise ships.
Fernande is a dream to sail, though this may have something to do with the anti-seasickness patch behind my ear, which is having a beguilingly slo-mo effect on everything I see and do. The luminous star I am steering by gazes back like a cool, hypnotic eye. Too cold even to shiver, I concentrate on smoothing a course through the mountains of black water around me.
The skipper's head pops out of the hatch. "All okay?" he mouths. I nod energetically. Umbilically attached to the wheel by a safety harness, I feel I could sail round the world. "We've just passed the convergence. You'll feel it get cold in a minute."
Colder? I chuckle warm breath into the fleece scarf round my face. He must be joking. A few seconds later I realise that 60 degrees is not just a line on the map where the Atlantic and Antarctic waters meet. It's a different way of breathing.
There are 10 of us aboard Fernande, including our French captain Pascal Grinberg and the mate/cook, Argentinean Giulia Luisetti. My fellow crew are a Ukrainian entrepreneur in a black stetson, an Israeli girl on her year off, a charming Swiss couple, the vice president of Polish Gas, a French pot holer and a Swedish businessman. We speak in English, Spanish and French. Fernande has been many things to many people - an expedition yacht for climbers, filmmakers, naturalists, snowboarders and paragliders. For this trip, she's a Babel boat, an engaging experiment in international goodwill.
Everyone does what they can; chopping onions, wrestling canvas, telling stories, keeping watch. We drink champagne sailing past Cape Horn on a sunny morning, grateful for our luck. It takes us three days and nights to cross the Drake Passage between Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego and Deception Island. We visit the old research base, inhale the sulphur steam, and clamber up cliffs to view a penguin colony whose population is bigger than Japan.
One more night's sail and I wake to see sunrise over the Antarctic peninsula, a slab of rose quartz wreathed in gold light. Perhaps it's the simple beauty, perhaps it's the thought that we're looking at one of the last unspoiled continents on the planet, but the view makes more than one of us weep. Then, without warning, we all fall over as a massive impact shakes Fernande keel to mast. One of Antarctica's many uncharted rocks has just been discovered, in a stretch marked 10 fathoms deep.
Adrenalin seizes us. We pick ourselves up, claw the sails down, start the engine. Pascal quickly checks the crew: we are stunned but not seriously hurt. Then he dives into the bilge. Freezing sea is pouring in from a hole beneath the waterline. With remarkable nonchalance he starts the bilge pump and we are put on 24-hour watch. But we're not going back. This is the trip of a lifetime, and they only come around once. In fact, this is only the "we're leaking" pump. The "oh dear, we're sinking" auxiliary remains happily ignored. For Pascal, who's been sailing for 30 years, the incident is no more than that - a minor variation on the utter unpredictability of life at sea. For those of us seeking authentic 'Antarctic explorer' experience, however, it's convincing enough.
A few hours after our discovery of the rock, we are gliding through a bowlful of blue ice, watching seals and taking pictures. Gently we drift towards a bigger berg. I call Pascal, nervously, not knowing how near is too near. He waves at me to start the engine. There's a terrible squeal of machinery and nothing happens. The propeller has just made contact with the extended underside of the berg, and it has bent. From 10 knots of engine power we're down to two. Pascal rolls his eyes to heaven. Thank God this is a sailing boat. From then on our approach is necessarily more cautious. We travel down the peninsula visiting the scattered islands and their attendant colonies of seals and bird life. Whales soon begin to appear, with a faint smell of fish and the odd rainbow caught in their spume.
Antarctica is not like anything. Ice comes in every shade, from copper sulphate blue through krill pink through bronze to dove grey and glassy black. And that's without the sunsets. Viewed beneath slate grey skies in a gale from hell, while the barometer dropped so low the needle fell off the drum, vast bergs would travel past Fernande in all shades of mermaid turquoise, like killer angels on the wing. We sat and watched, comparing the travelling ice forms, with their clutches of seals, to everything we knew - commuters on trains, beaches in the sun, palaces, faces, space ships, floating meringues.
What this continent really needs is new verbs. Spanish has two verbs for 'to be'; Antarctica needs about 20. It just 'is' - in a different way from anywhere else in the world. Ice cramps the sea, seals it like wax, or flirts with it, volatile as mercury. The sea itself seems to breathe with an intention, a will of its own. Vast expanses respire, smooth and regular as an acre of dinosaur chest. Then sudden rills of water run through the patches like shivers across skin. What you feel is small: acutely, thrillingly small.
The Ukrainian base at Vernadsky is our most southerly landfall. Beyond that the ice is too thick. On the other side of the peninsula, the Larsen ice shelf has broken away, but here it's too iced up to sail. So much for global warming. The mere idea of man's mischief interfering here is too appalling to entertain.
Invited for homemade vodka in the base bar, we explain our engine problem. The crew of Mission Antarctica, on a voyage to raise awareness of environmental threats to the last unexploited continent, are also invited ashore. Toasts are raised late into the evening. But by 7am they are diving in their dry suits to remove our disabled propeller. We lug it ashore to the workshop, where a large Ukrainian with an even bigger hammer crosses himself before whacking the bent propeller end. Problem solved.
We turn north again with regret. From a disparate bunch of dreamers we have turned into a noisy and chaotic kind of family. No one wants to go home.
But home we now are. And our memories of a frozen Eden are being threatened already by ugly news. Pintail and Teal, two tankers heading from Japan, have gone there to collect a load of MOX (plutonium oxide): nuclear waste that no one wants. Today, those two ships have left their port in Japan to ship the waste back to Britain, but no one knows via which route. Clearly, no route would be a good one.
Fernande and a handful of other yachts have decided that if the convoy comes round Cape Horn they will spend the austral winter, the worst time of year to be at sea, protesting. Fifty-four countries have signed a treaty agreeing not to exploit Antarctica until 2041. But no one has signed anything to prevent the transport of nuclear waste. If an accident occurs to Pintail or Teal, or if terrorism turns its head their way, then the consequences will be not only disastrous but irremediable. In the Irish Sea and the Pacific, more independent yachts are forming flotillas to protest. Greenpeace is doing its best, but the world's attention is hard to focus on something so far away.
Our tiptoe round Antarctica is being mocked by corporate bullies with heavy boots. I salute the little ships for taking on the big ships, and can only say I wish I was going too. Surely few expeditions have had such a vital aim.
· To find out more about expeditions aboard Fernande, go to www.fernandexp.com.
· To find out more about the protest go to: www.nuclearfree.co.nz.
Ways to go
Penny Williams travelled from Gatwick to Buenos Aires, then from BA to Ushuaia, with Journey Latin America. Flights cost: £922.90, including taxes.
The 30-day trip aboard Fernande cost £3,522, all-inclusive. You need to take your own foul weather gear, and twice as much film as you think you'll need.
