An Antarctic Cruise
Thursday, July 15th, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
Two nautical charts are on the ship’s navigation table. Never surveyed waters surround the ship, according to both charts. A reasonable path, the captain opts to maintain a course drawn on depth soundings. Though he travels the Antarctic frequently, the captain hasn’t ever sailed this channel.
Dusk sets in and reduces visibility. Then is starts to snow in earnest. The icebergs that impeded the channel are harder to see as the huge snowflakes stick to the bridge windows. Radar clearly shows them, even with our diminished eyesight. Orange blotches, the program’s choice for icebergs, fill the screen.A giant orange clump waits imposingly ahead. Three kilometers separate us from the behemoth. You need to visit this site to learn about antarctica travel adventures.
At the one kilometer mark, the captain whisper a quiet order. With a flick of the wheel, the helmsman steers the ship away from the danger. We glimpse a tabular iceberg through the shroud of fog and snow. This is a unique form of iceberg that can only be seen in the southern ocean. This type of iceberg sports a flat, wide top with sides that rise straight upwards.
Antarctica has struck me speechless again. The goal is to reach the Antarctic Circle via this polar class cruise ship. Life was seemingly absent on some of the far-away places we passed on our trip. Seventy-nine years after having been first sighted in 1820, a human spent an entire winter on Antarctica for the first time. Scientists followed the explorers who quickly attempted to find the southern pole. Now you don’t have to be an independently-wealthy individual to travel to Antarctica. Now, traveling to Antarctica costs a tourist just about as much as a Caribbean adventure would.
Think of Antarctica in terms of a manta ray with a curving tail. The very tip of South America is 500 miles away from Antarctica. This is the Drake Passage, and some extremely rough seas are found here. It has also been called the ‘Slobbering Jaws of Hell’ and extracts a high price for passage. One of the passengers told us all to stow everything and secure the latches on the cabin portholes before they went to bed. Learn about adventure antarctica tours.
We left Ushuaia, the Argentine city on Tierra del Fuego, and crossed the calm waters of the Beagle Channel. It’s open ocean after that. We spent two days on very rough seas with no land in sight. Winds that could have registered as gale force blew for the whole two days. Waves that crashed across the bow of the ship caused spray to rocket past may fourth deck window. A passenger?s seasickness greatly affected the height of the swells he or she saw. Some reported swells between fifteen and forty feet.
The Southern Ocean greeted us after two days of sailing from South America. I saw a coastal archipelago first thing that morning. Though still not smooth, the waters seemed to be a bit sedated by the land mass. Mile-high summits were draped in wispy clouds. The ridges stuck through the smooth glaciers at sharp angles. The ice goes right into the water in huge frozen slabs. They are crackled and bumpy, not smooth like the glaciers. The mountains, which looked they could house Everest, appeared to jump straight up from the sea.
One passenger thought that childbirth?s labor was similar to our efforts to reach Antarctica. Of all the continents on earth, Antarctica averages the coldest, windiest, highest and driest statistics. The polar plateau only gets about as much precipitation as Death Valley does, even though it holds about 70 percent of the fresh water on the planet. Antarctica is owned by no one, harbors no indigenous human population, nor do animals live year round on her.
To ensure safety, shore landings and sailing routes must be altered according to the day’s weather. Our guides have advised us that we’ll need to be flexible, but our initial shore landing comes as scheduled. The assigned groups meet on deck. After the call for my group, I climb into an inflatable boat with nine other people. We travel across a mere quarter mile of water until we run aground. And, with that last step, I become one of the few who can honestly say they’ve been to this seventh continent.
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