DAY 2: Saturday March 19
Unfortunately, I was asleep when we passed Cape Horn around midnight. I’m told it looked like a towering mountain of rock in the moonlight. We are now about halfway through the Drake Passage. I’m told that so far (11 a.m.) this is about as good as the weather gets in the Drake. Stormy and gray and the ship is rocking steadily – but the guides say that this is “Drake Lake”; on it’s best behavior.
Albatrosses are zooming around the ship. But there is no perspective so it’s hard to believe these birds have a 10 foot wingspan. They stay aloft for almost year at a time. Landing only to breed.
Sir Robert pointed out the significance of where we are right now, heading south. If you took off perpendicular from the ship in either direction, the next thing you would bump into is the other side of this very ship. Again, nowhere else in the world could you do that.
If the weather stays this “good”, we should reach Antarctica by tomorrow afternoon.
Evening update: we will pass 60 degrees south at about midnight. That means we are technically in Antarctica. We are also about an hour from the “Antarctic Convergence”; this is where the freezing cold southern ocean and the Pacific and Atlantic crash together. Might be a bit bumpy. Weather has picked up and more people are getting sick. Also, we are told that we will be hit with a major storm in about two days. Great.
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