Ushuaia is the closest city in the world to the frozen continent though it’s still a respectable two to three day ocean journey of 1,000 km across infamous Drake Passage to get there. You take your chances with Drake; it may be a smooth pond or it may be a raging watery inferno. We got neither. The weather wasn’t bad but there was quite a big steep-sided swell running which kept the ship rolling and the staff busy replacing the vomit bags hanging along the corridors. This is the price often to be paid for crossing the passage, a price referred to in nautical parlance as the ‘Drake Tax’. I paid a bit of Drake tax myself and would be a liar if I said I had a great time during the crossing. The curtains in our cabin swished in and out pendulum-like, marking out the ship’s roll. To move around the ship it was necessary to hang on to railings. You didn’t simply walk, you zigzagged. The catering manager joked that when it gets really rough he dispenses a litre of whisky to each passenger; everyone is then soon seen walking in a straight line.
In summer, many small ice strengthened ships make a 10 to 15 day journey to Antarctica and back. A few of the huge super cruise ships do too. Two of the latter were docked in Ushuaia when we were there – Costa Luminosa and Norwegian Sun. The enormous size and sophisticated stabilizers of ships like these make for a luxurious, smooth cruise with little movement. But they have one big disadvantage for travel to Antarctica; no-one is permitted to get off the ship as there are simply too many people on board, possibly 2,500 or more. In contrast, the small ships that make the journey carry only 80 to 200 passengers and are loaded with rubber zodiacs powered by outboard motors. These can be lowered into the water and launched, allowing the passengers to get much more ‘up close and personal’ with icebergs, whales etc, while of course still keeping a safe, appropriate distance. They even make it possible for passengers to set foot on Antarctic land. So the experience is quite different between the two types of ship.
We were keen to have the more intimate experience provided by the smaller ships and were prepared to pay the Drake tax to get it. And so it was that we found ourselves on Saturday 6 February with a drink in hand pulling away from the Ushuaia docks on the 117 passenger Sea Adventurer, a small vessel even amongst the smaller ships, but stylish and beautiful, built in Yugoslavia in an era when ships really were ships, in the days of timber and brass fittings, before computers and plastics.
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Crossing the Drake there wasn’t much to do except to sleep, eat (the food on board was excellent and we aren’t easy to impress in that department), and to attend presentations given by the enthusiastic staff. After listening to the bird expert, we went with him to the stern where he pointed out the names and habits of the various birds approaching the ship. He told us some surprising facts. Albatrosses and petrels have a very keen sense of smell and can pick up the scent of potential food from as far as 20 km away! It’s the ship’s kitchen they smell, and they fly in to investigate! Albatrosses have a wing span of up to 3.6 metres, twice my height, and with a tail wind they can cruise at up to 150 km per hour. But with nothing released from the ship, there’s no food here for them and they don’t stay long before flying off. When they do locate food, they need to eat a lot, and quickly. At one feeding an albatross can eat food weighing 25% of its own body weight. To match that ratio we’d each need to eat 15-18 kg of food for dinner!
The bird watching brought out the hardcore photography enthusiasts amongst the passengers, the ones with the metre long bazooka lenses that must be a pain to pack and carry around on a long trip. But I have to admit they take fantastic photos; one guy showed me the image he’d taken of an albatross 150 metres behind the ship. It filled the frame and the detail was crystal clear. All I could do with my shirt pocket digital was to take aim in the general direction of a bird, then later crop the photo to enlarge the image of the bird, if indeed I’d even managed to get the bird in the photo at all. This is how I managed to produce the image below of a fast-moving wandering albatross 100 metres or so off the ship. We spotted the first floating iceberg exactly 48 hours after leaving Ushuaia, not long after entering the Antarctic Convergence, a zone where the Antarctic ocean meets and mixes with the warmer waters to the north. The mist-shrouded berg signalled that Antarctica wasn’t far away now. Excitement was rising on the ship.
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