A-BootRoom-2.jpg
Ship Boot Room
As indicated in the description of the most recent "map," after leaving Petermann Island, several of us had the opportunity to traverse part of the Lemaire Channel in the small boats (an extra-cost excursion).
I suspect this photo and the next one were not really taken on that day, but this seemed like a good place to put them. They are related to loading and unloading the small boats at the ship.
The ship supplied boots to use during landing. The boots were stored in this room on Deck 2, near where we entered the boats (the boats were pulled inside the ship and stored in same this general area between landings). The boots are on racks, sorted by shoe size.
They said the reason for this was to control what microbes, seeds, insects, etc. was transported onto and off of Antarctica and its offshore islands, in accordance with the Antarctic Treaty and the shipping company's permits. There was a shallow trough containing some kind of disinfectant and detergent that we waded through between this boot room and the boats (we did the disinfectant process both entering the small boats and leaving them). There was an absorbant (and mildly abrasive) doormat-type material at the bottom of the troughs.
It was possible to bring one's own boots -- and perhaps 6 or 8 people did that. However, they wanted "personal boots" to also be stored in this room during the trip (they had a separate rack for those boots). As discussed elsewhere in this album, I'm pretty sure a reason for keeping these boots off the higher (carpeted) decks was to avoid having penguin poop tracked to other parts of the ship.
With regard to minimizing contaminating the Antarctic (in accordance the treaty and the ship permits), before the first landing after crossing the Drake Passage, we went throught an exercise where we took our personal coats and pants to an area to have them vacuumed by members of the crew (including vacuuming the insides of pockets). The "blue penguin" jackets were exempt from this, since they had issued them to us the first day on the ship, so those jackets could not have picked up much "contaminnation" (there are probably flaws in that logic, but I wasn't going to argue). What they wanted to clean was stuff we would be wearing on shore that could have picked up seeds, microbes, etc. from other continents. When I say coats here, it means coats we might wear instead of or under the "blue penguin" unlined jackets.
There were charts at various places on the ship giving the layout of the various decks. The place where this boot room (and the place next to it where the small Polar Cirkel boats were stored between landings) was called the "Car Deck". Apparently, the ship was designed with the intention that someday this will be used as a ferry along the coast of Norway (this will probably when they build a new ship that takes over the Antarctic cruises). Apparently Hurtigruten (the company that owns the Fram) had 6 or 8 ships operating as coastal ferrys. They also do Arctic cruises of various kinds in the Northern Hermisph
