Antarctica 2023: From Ushuaia to Antarctica

The Beagle Channel

We boarded the boat around 4pm on Wednesday, and were shown to our room, which was quite nice.  After a bit of unpacking, we headed up to the bar, where there was a safety briefing and a presentation about how things would generally go on a daily basis on the trip -- basically morning wakeup call, breakfast, morning landing/activity, lunch, afternoon landing/activity, daily wrap-up (where we would go over the plans for overnight/the next day) and then dinner.  Then we did the evacuation drill, so we went to our rooms to get our life jackets and then went to our muster stations and stood around for a bit.  Later there was a welcome cocktail hour with the captain, followed by a buffet dinner (dinner is usually not a buffet, just this first night it was).

There was a lot of wind in Ushuaia — the whitecaps in the harbor were crazy — so we were a bit delayed leaving the dock.  But we ended up getting going around 8pm.  We lost cell reception sooner than I expected, though we passed a port town in Chile on the way down the Beagle Channel and briefly had it back.  Also on the way down the Beagle Channel, we had some super awesome red skies, which various people attempted to take pictures of.

Our room

We stayed up fairly late in the bar, and by the time we went to sleep, I guess we were still in the Beagle Channel, because I remember thinking that I could barely tell that we were on a moving boat as I was falling asleep.  I woke up in the middle of the night and the boat was moving more, so we must have made it to the Drake Passage, but it wasn’t a lot of boat movement.

The forecast for Thursday day was reasonably okay, and it was in fact quite calm.  Well, there were whitecaps all around us, but the boat ride was very comfortable.  We attended a lecture about birds we might see on the Drake Passage (with a focus on albatross) and cetaceans.  We also attended the mandatory dive briefing.  After that, we dragged most of our dive gear up to the dive hangar, and put together weight belts and stuff.

Other than that, we ate 3 meals and spent a fair amount of time out on deck looking for (but not really seeing) interesting birds or whales.

The forecast for the next day was that it would be much worse, it was supposed to start overnight, so we were told to secure everything in our cabins.

The much worse weather didn’t really materialize.  Well, there were apparently 35 knot winds, but the ride was quite comfortable.  I guess the wind direction was favorable.  In the morning there was a talk about history of exploration of Antarctica, which we skipped (too many lectures in one day) and then another one on photography.  The crew member presenting on photography (Christian) is from Norway (and had a mix of Arctic and Antarctic pictures in his presentation); it left me really wanting to go to the Arctic to see some polar bears!  In the afternoon, we had all of our outdoor gear inspected for “biosecurity” and then Faith gave a talk on diving in Antarctica, and there was also a talk on penguins, specifically the ones we’d likely see on the trip (chinstrap, Adelie, and gentoo).

Overnight, in the middle of the night, it got fairly rough — rough enough that it was pretty hard to sleep just from the back and forth motion.  But by the time we woke up it was much calmer.