Antarctic - Vessel stuck in non-existent ice!

Well, it would have been non-existent if one had believed the media and particularly the BBC during the past year or so. After all, how many times have we been told that the polar ice caps are decreasing in size and how many times have we been shown videos of huge icebergs breaking away from the ice-caps due to warming?
This is the Antarctic summer and there is so much ice that a research/cruise ship has got stuck in the ice in a normally ice free area of the Antarctic Ocean. Clearly the Captain believed the climate change models and not the conditions in front of him! A bit of an embarrassment that the global warming researchers aboard the ship had not expected!
A number of ice-breakers are racing to the rescue - I wonder whether they will get salvage money based on the ship's value, which would otherwise be a write-off if left stuck in the ice during winter.
This incident confirms what a friend told me after he had been on an Antarctic cruise a couple of years ago; the vessel was not able to go as far south as it had in the past due to ice, and they were flown off by the ship's helicopter to see the "sights".

Full details in "Watts Up With That" where they claim that the whole junket was a BBC/Guardian/ABC CAGW exercise, presumably aimed at showing how bad global warming had become.