Globetrotting Don's Stromness double
By Lorraine Shearer
(From The Orcadian dated September 4, 2003)

The ship HMS Endurance pictured alongside the jetty at the old whaling station called Stromness on the island of South Georgia.

From Stromness to Stromness, that is Don Mackay’s claim to fame.

You may wonder what on earth he is going on about, but the lecturer, who is originally from Wick and now lives in Aberdeen, says it is quite an achievement.

For the two towns of Stromness that Don has visited lie almost top to toe on a globe, thousands of miles apart.

“I have the distinction of having been in two places called Stromness,” he said. “One Stromness is in Antarctica and the other is in Orkney. I have summered in South Georgia where the second Stromness is.”

Don, who is in his 60s, is a member of the British Antarctic Survey Team and has spent three winters in Antarctica, at Halley Bay, Signy Island and Rothera.

He was a base commander and instrumental in the building of the scientific research stations in the area. Antarctica is an ice-covered continent surrounding the South Pole and occupies ten per cent of the world’s surface.

There are no permanent residents and settlements are limited to the research stations.

South Georgia lies 800 miles south east of the Falkland Islands and north of the South Orkney Islands.

It was visited by Captain James Cook and the explorer Edward Shackleton is buried there.

“A lot of people went down to South Georgia from Orkney, some of them from Stromness, to work at the whaling and that’s why a whaling station was named after Stromness. It was used to accommodate the crews off the whaling ships. Orkney people were very strong, very diligent. You had to be – can you imagine working in temperatures like -20 degrees C, cutting up whales in the open air,” he said.

Don, who is a lecturer in civil engineering at Aberdeen University, visited Stromness during this year’s Shopping Week specifically so that he could say he had been to both.

“I summered in South Georgia in 1971. We stayed in tents before putting up one single building at King Edward Point. Stromness was a whaling station but there is nothing there now. It is dilapidated, it’s a shame really.”

Despite the obvious temperature differences, there are similarities between the two, Don explained.

“The sunsets are similar and the landscape is similar because of the continual wind so there are no trees,” he said, adding that he intends to return to both.