Drake Passage
An excited group of guests and crew departed the port city of Ushuaia, Argentina, bound for the Antarctic Peninsula, just before supper time last night. That same group experienced a calm and peaceful evening aboard, all the way up to bedtime and beyond...let’s say until about 3:30 a.m. At that time the good ship Endeavour, so-far steadily underway through the unquestionably protected waterways of the Beagle Channel, crossed south of Cape Horn and entered into the Drake Passage. The answer to the question so many guests had posed just hours earlier was at hand: “What will the crossing be like?” Some of us were awoken at that early hour by the message and the messenger – one and the same in this case – and some of us found out from the ship-wide wake up call at 0800: “An unusually steep and closely spaced swell of around ten feet is striking us on our starboard quarter. Otherwise, it is really quite a smooth crossing compared to what it could be.”
As we moved about the ship, making frequent use of the ample roping provided for crossing open interior spaces, we were left to imagine just what a “could be” experience might be like. This was quite enough, thank you! Chairs moving by themselves half way across the room. Mysterious crashing sounds coming from dinner-ware closets. And the occasional need to whole-heartedly embrace a complete stranger (or piece of furniture with stranger in it) in order to stay on your own two feet. The latter activity in particular served to promote the lesson that “were all in this together” very quickly and I must say that everyone did very well in picking up on the wisdom of such a teaching.
It is from such lessons that one gains the confidence to go it alone, as the guest in the photo is doing, and single-handedly shoot video of albatross and giant petrels from the upper aft deck while the ship pitches from left to right and back again, like a metronome on a slow beat. Many species introduced to us in the seabird presentation by naturalist Richard White made live appearances just off our stern and other species R.S.V.P.’d that they would show up later in the trip...or so we will assume and do our best to be observant when they arrive! That, after all, is why we are here: to be observant!
An excited group of guests and crew departed the port city of Ushuaia, Argentina, bound for the Antarctic Peninsula, just before supper time last night. That same group experienced a calm and peaceful evening aboard, all the way up to bedtime and beyond...let’s say until about 3:30 a.m. At that time the good ship Endeavour, so-far steadily underway through the unquestionably protected waterways of the Beagle Channel, crossed south of Cape Horn and entered into the Drake Passage. The answer to the question so many guests had posed just hours earlier was at hand: “What will the crossing be like?” Some of us were awoken at that early hour by the message and the messenger – one and the same in this case – and some of us found out from the ship-wide wake up call at 0800: “An unusually steep and closely spaced swell of around ten feet is striking us on our starboard quarter. Otherwise, it is really quite a smooth crossing compared to what it could be.”
As we moved about the ship, making frequent use of the ample roping provided for crossing open interior spaces, we were left to imagine just what a “could be” experience might be like. This was quite enough, thank you! Chairs moving by themselves half way across the room. Mysterious crashing sounds coming from dinner-ware closets. And the occasional need to whole-heartedly embrace a complete stranger (or piece of furniture with stranger in it) in order to stay on your own two feet. The latter activity in particular served to promote the lesson that “were all in this together” very quickly and I must say that everyone did very well in picking up on the wisdom of such a teaching.
It is from such lessons that one gains the confidence to go it alone, as the guest in the photo is doing, and single-handedly shoot video of albatross and giant petrels from the upper aft deck while the ship pitches from left to right and back again, like a metronome on a slow beat. Many species introduced to us in the seabird presentation by naturalist Richard White made live appearances just off our stern and other species R.S.V.P.’d that they would show up later in the trip...or so we will assume and do our best to be observant when they arrive! That, after all, is why we are here: to be observant!
