On the ship’s navigation table, two nautical charts are laid out. They showed these waters have yet to be surveyed. To maintain our safety, the captain keeps the ship on track using depth soundings. This channel is new to him, though he’s sailed the Antarctic many, many times.
Dusk brings challenges to seeing, and then it starts to snow. When the flakes hit the bridge windows, they stick and make it hard to see the huge icebergs blocking our path.Luckily, the radar clearly shows each iceberg. We can see large spots of orange, indicating icebergs, on the screen. One enormous glob dominates the channel ahead on the monitor. We are three kilometers from it. You need to visit this site to learn about great antarctica tours.
At the one kilometer mark, the captain whisper a quiet order. The ship is quickly steered from danger, as the helmsman follows his command. A tabular iceberg, which can only be seen in this region, looms like a ghost through the fog and snow. Sporting straight sides that rise rapidly into the air, this berg is over one hundred feet tall. The top is very flat and very wide.
This gave Antarctica another chance to amaze me. Our goal was the Antarctic Circle at the bottom of the globe, and our vehicle was a polar class cruise vessel. We’ve mapped a route that will bring us past some of this world’s least hospitable and least inhabited areas. Though Antarctica was officially found in 1820, no one wintered over on the land until 79 years later. Explorers searching for the southern pole struggled and scientists were the next to approach Antarctica. You used to have to be rich to travel to Antarctica. You’ll spend as much to cruise to Antarctica as you would to experience the Caribbean, thanks to falling prices.
Think of Antarctica in terms of a manta ray with a curving tail. The very most northern tip of Antarctica is still 500 ocean miles from South America. This area of water is known as Drakes Passage and sports some of the worst seas on the planet. It has also been called the ‘Slobbering Jaws of Hell’ and extracts a high price for passage. We followed the advice of one passenger, who suggested we make sure everything was stowed and that the porthole latches of our cabins were secure before we went to bed. Learn about adventure antarctica tours.
Having left Ushuaia, the Argentine city on Tierra del Fuego we came through the smooth Beagle Channel and found open ocean. The next two days were spent on very rough waters, without so much as a glimpse of land.Nearly gale-forced winds pounded us the whole time.The spray splashed even above my fourth-deck window as waves crashed across the bow. Though it usually depended on how seasick you felt, you could see swells that were between fifteen and forty feet.
Two days out of South America, we found the Southern Ocean. The next morning, I could see a coastal archipelago. The seas seemed to have been calmed by the land. High mountains were topped in wispy clouds. Dark, spiky ridges cut through the glacier’s smooth surface. The ice reaching the sea, is chopped and cracked. It is full of fissures and falls into the water in frozen slabs. It looks like someone took the Alps and sunk them into the deep blue water.
One passenger found the cruise to the Antarctic reminiscent of the labor of childbirth.This continent, just like a spoiled child, is the coldest, driest, highest, and windiest of all the continents. Holding 70 percent of earth?s fresh water, the polar plateau gets the same amount of precipitation as Death Valley does. This land is owned by no person, and has no human population, nor do animals live year round here.
We have to rely upon the weather to plan where to sail or when and where to land on shore in this inclement area. We were warned to be flexible with when we expected to land, luckily we were right on time. The assigned groups meet on deck. After the call for my group, I climb into an inflatable boat with nine other people. The powerful outboard quickly crosses the quarter mile to land. And then, with one simple step, I am in the small group of humans who has ever touched Antarctic ice.