Sarah

My name is Sarah. I am 38. Marine biology PhD, offshore navigator, trained on a boat since childhood. I was born in Sydney, in a family where the ocean is not a pastime but a given. Dinghy from age six, junior racing in the harbour, then offshore, then sailing measured in weeks rather than hours. The ocean was never an interlude. It was a field.

I am ten the first time a southern right whale drifts into the bay one winter morning. The breathing, the sound of air expelled, the mass gliding under the tender without making a wave. I did not really decide afterwards: everything fell into place from there.

Studies at the University of Sydney. Marine biology, then a PhD focused on Southern Ocean cetaceans: ecotypes, distribution ranges, the way of holding an observation framework when the ocean gives no respite. I preferred long campaigns to laboratory careers, slow vessels to fast boats. Ten years of polar and subantarctic field work. Publications, yes, but above all catalogues, time series, datasets others can pick up. I publish little. I share a lot of data.

In early 2020, I board ARION with colleagues for a study mission in the Ross Sea. The Captain holds the course. I hold the protocol. The boat keeps us in the South longer than planned. Around Antarctica was born of that meeting: a boat able to hold the South, a biologist able to hold the framework, a route that demands both.

For the expedition, I am taking a sabbatical year. Not a comfort choice, a necessity. The Southern Ocean below 60°S is not visited in two weeks. And keeping my independence in analysis and publication is what keeps the work valuable. I am no longer here to learn what the Southern Ocean is. I am here to run one more route through it.