Off Danco Island near the Antarctic Peninsula - Tuesday Feb 22

Since I last posted we flew from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, boarded Le Boreal and left our harbour mooring like a scalded cat. Our first and probably our biggest hurdle on this trip is crossing the Drake Passage, a two day sail across one of the most unpredictable and roughest stretches of water on the planet. It is the single biggest reason why V chose to miss taking this trip. The Drake Passage is the body of water between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula and is filled with very strong currents and where weather that can turn savage very quickly.
We had just missed a large low pressure system that was moving in an easterly direction across the Passage and which had winds gusting to 50 knots and 8 metre seas. As the tail end of the storm moved through there was a quieter interlude with more moderate winds and lower seas but the forecast called for an even bigger low pressure system to move through the Passage late on Sunday. As this was Saturday evening the Captain wanted to move as quickly as he could to get as close to our destination as possible before the weather changed for the worse. Accordingly we made all speed to leave the harbour in Ushuaia and begin our passage.
By quieter interlude I mean relatively speaking. The Drake is described as having two states, lake and shake and while we were in the lake mode we still had 2 to 3 metre swells and a stiff wind that blew the tops off the waves. There is no joy in swells, the vessel rolls and lurches and while we were making good speed it was a classic moment of “one hand for the ship and one hand for yourself”. Getting sea legs was a priority but there was no time for their gradual development, we were thrown into the deep end and there were lots of green gills.
Late on Sunday the winds really began to pick up, the seas grew much higher and the swells were replaced by waves whose tops streamed away behind them, blown by the wind into long frothy white streamers. My cabin is on Deck 4 and from my balcony floor to water level is probably 7 or 8 metres. During the night there were crashes as waves broke over my balcony and crashed onto the balcony doors. This persisted all through Monday until we arrived at Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands, just off Antarctica. The captain moved the ship into a sheltered bay and dropped anchor, expecting to wait out the storm and begin our Antarctic expeditions the following day, today.
The winds however, even in the shelter of the bay were gusting between 55 and 60 knots (60 knots is 110 kmph) tilting the boat on an angle and dragging our anchor. We therefore lifted the anchor and moved out into open water where with the engines running we could manoeuvre the boat and keep the ship head to wind, effectively heaving-to. This we did overnight and today we arrived on the Antarctic Peninsula with the winds now substantially reduced and the sea as flat as its ever likely to get. Zodiacs heading out this afternoon for our first landing on an Antarctic beach.
We have not had any sun since we left Ushuaia, unbroken and very low clouds and everything lit by pearly grey light. The landscape is almost a black and white picture with the occasional flash of blue from rifts in glacier ice on land. Looks very much as I expected.
Since our only connection to the internet is via a satellite uplink whose speed would make a tortoise look like a racehorse, I’m unable to include any pictures. These will have to wait until we are within range of a cell tower, possibly on the Falklands, so until then you will have to put up with my attempt at word pictures