> Finally, I have found out the end of the text on page 129 of “Transactions of the Oceanographical Institute”.
“The scientific reconnaissance vessel “Slava-9” began his regular 13th cruise with the “Slava” Antarctic whaling fleet on 22 October 1958 … On 27 November she got to Bouvet Island. A group of sailors landed which couldn’t leave the island in time because of worsened weather and stayed on it about 3 days. The people were withdrawn only by helicopter on 29 November”.
The mystery is resolved. The answer turned out to be a quite prosaic one. I am even feeling kind of regret for it.
So pretty much what the author suspected - it was a soviet vessel, and the details of the adventure were most likely hidden deep in an ex-soviet archive somewhere, almost impossible to find(until someone did, obviously).
Well, with the completely unexpected addition that the mysterious flattened copper sheet may well have been left by a ham radio operator who made an expedition to the island just for the purpose of making radio contact from there.
As luck would have it, there is an expedition to Bouvet right now and yes, you can see their progress live and read updates on facebook. I've read about this mystery years ago, it's fascinating that there are people there right this second as I write this.
So from what I can gather, they're going all the way to Bouvet Island to bounce radio waves off the Moon and back to Earth. Why??? To say they did it? I don't understand this hobby.
First of all - many amateur radio operators take great interest in having been in contact with lots of countries and territories.
Some are trivial - I just checked, so far this year I’ve got some 80 German stations in my log - some are exceedingly rare (Like Bouvet. Or North Korea, as the authorities there have a less than enlightened stance on individuals communicating with the outside world.)
The din you’d hear if you tuned a radio receiver to a frequency used by the Bouvet exoedition would be similar to what you’d hear if you ventured into a stadium packed with tweens and yelled that you had tickets for a Bieber meet and greet to whoever wanted them the most - literally tens of thousands of operators calling them at once - some for the associated bragging rights, some for testing their station’s capabilities...
More specifically about the moonbounce thing - that is HARD; you blast as much power as you can get hold of into the biggest, most badass antenna you can afford, and then, if the stars align, the gods smile &c - your signal is strong enough to get reflected back to earth where someone else may hear it (if they, too, went through major inconveniences to hone their antenna badassery enough to pick up a gnat’s fart from half a million miles away.
There’s hardly any rational reason why one would do such a thing, but the sense of accomplishment once you nail it is indescribable.
Oh, it can easily be mindbogglingly expensive, but it can be done on a (relative) shoestring, too. (Though arguably, to some extent, going cheap just means you are leeching off someone else, as the guy at the other end will need a bigger everything to make the signal to noise ratio acceptable at both ends.)
I've tried it a few times, out of pocket expense was way less than $1k - using software to generate smart modulation schemes like JT65b, you can get performance orders of magnitude better than what a human ear can pick up - leading to orders of magnitude less impressive - cough - stations.
Costs were more or less like this:
Computer - $0. (Already had one for other purposes)
Software - $0. (Gotta love freeware!)
Soundcard interface - $30 in parts
Transceiver - $250 (Early nineties vintage)
150W solid-state amplifier, 2nd hand - $40, needed fixing.
Low-loss feedline - $65, plus a couple of hours in the car to pick it up.
Mast - $0 (Repurposed an old flagpole)
Antenna - $180 (DIY 2x12 element yagis. Cost of materials)
Now, this is a bare-bones setup - more power and more antenna would make life a lot easier. Also, it would be nice to be able to rotate the antennas (Now I just aim for where the moon will rise and wait for it to whizz by)
The article mentions that an expedition just few years later didn't observe the presence of a lifeboat(or anything else) so either it was washed into the sea, or they didn't look for it. I'm sure these guys are going to have a look for any signs, they are planning to stay on the island for 14-16 days.
I absolutely love good writing like this. If this was a journalist's quick report or a Wikipedia article, it wouldn't be as riviting as this is, and I might have lost interest partially through.
A rare instance of fascinating writing in the “long-form” genre. I would expect a long-form article on this topic to begin with an intriguing paragraph, then, immediately upon mentioning the name of explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, diverge into a dozen paragraphs describing in the floweriest language Bouvet’s grandmother’s lifelong love of daffodils.
"A speck of ice in the middle of a freezing fastness: a few square miles of uninhabited volcanic basalt groaning under several hundred feet of glacier, scraped raw by gales, shrouded by drifts of sea-fog, and utterly devoid of trees, shelter, or landing places."
Makes me think of:
"I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts."
"Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death."
Why is it that we get so affected by symbolism like that? Is it just because telling stories is such a big part of our culture, or is it something deeper, more physiological than that? Does anyone know of a good book that can shine more light on humanity's strange relationship to symbols?
I didn't really read any symbolism into this. I think it's more that it was a great mystery. The island is so out of the way the presence of a derelict lifeboat is going to intrigue people and motivate them to figure who was there, when they were there, and what they were doing.
Open a browser window to windy.com and scroll down to the lower Southern Ocean latitudes. You'll see the complex weather patterns that exist down there [0]. Further south is the Furious Fifties.
> Finally, I have found out the end of the text on page 129 of “Transactions of the Oceanographical Institute”.
“The scientific reconnaissance vessel “Slava-9” began his regular 13th cruise with the “Slava” Antarctic whaling fleet on 22 October 1958 … On 27 November she got to Bouvet Island. A group of sailors landed which couldn’t leave the island in time because of worsened weather and stayed on it about 3 days. The people were withdrawn only by helicopter on 29 November”.
The mystery is resolved. The answer turned out to be a quite prosaic one. I am even feeling kind of regret for it.