Southbound on the Drake Lake

LOCATION: At 6.36 pm we are 292 nautical miles from the east coast of King George Island. We are at 57 degrees latitude and 62 degrees longitude, and 12 or so hours from our first landing.

FOR ALL THE HORRENDOUS STORIES, our first full day of sailing on the notorious Drake Passage presents the stretch of southern sea at its most benign.
"How are you enjoying the Drake Lake?" conservation geneticist Dr Lynn Woodworth quipped at the start of her lecture on the seabirds of the Antarctic. It’s almost 5pm and Lynn has wrapped up the second lecture of this ‘sea-day’ devoted to snacking, snoozing and finding our sea-legs on a gently rolling Professor Molchanov.

We get to sleep in on sea-days, and since Dan’s wake-up call at 8am we’ve explored much of the Professor. She’s a solid little ship and one of the longest-serving from the original fleet of Finnish-made oceanographic research vessels put to service by the former Soviet Union.

As I write, I glimpse the graceful arc of a black-browed albatross from the open window in this cabin. I’ve left ship-mates in the lounge/bar to write this entry, and since the first word have bundled into warm clothes twice to race out onto deck and try and photograph the albatross. Well, not quite race – the pitch of the ship demands that one hand be free to brace against the wall or rail. If timed right, however, the roll will push you along and up stairs effortlessly.

Once completed I will email this entry from the Professor’s iridium satellite phone on the bridge, to my colleague Heidi who will post it to these pages. From there, I will also find out our exact location in longitude and latitude (posted at the top of this text) from the GPS monitor. The first mate may be busy with his chart and compass at the desk and if so I’ll take a seat up front and enjoy the best view on-board, and think once again how much I would love to be able to post photographs to this page for you to see.

The photograph I would post is one most of us took yesterday in the first hour after the gangplank was raised, customs had declared the ship and we had toasted our good fortune with a glass of bubbly.

Taken with goose-bumped arms that had nothing to do with the chill, the photo shows the bow of the ship gleaming white against the dark blue of the Beagle Channel. To the right is Chile, and to the left the last peaks of the Andes in Argentina. This is Patagonia.

At 10pm last night the sky was milky blue and the pilot had handed the Professor over to our Russian crew. I was slightly shocked to see him climb over the portside and into a waiting boat - to motor away to distant shores having navigated through the trickiest part of the Beagle Channel. In ten days’ time he will join us again, at 2am approximately, to guide us back to Ushuaia.

Earlier that day we’d passed the rusting wreck of a ship that had run aground only minutes after its pilot left the helm. Needless to say, it was a sombre reminder of how quickly fortunes can change.


We were also reminded of this with a lifeboat drill, a mandatory session that must be completed within 24 hours of sailing. At the call of the warning bell, Tricia and I bustled downstairs to our cabin to collect warm clothes, boots and a reassuringly heavy-duty lifejacket. By the third of the seven bells that scream "Emergency!" we pulled the lifejackets overhead and with 20 or so others, bundled into one of two lifeboats, to be joined by several crew. As the hatches were drawn overhead to seal us inside, I snuck glances at the faces of the crew in whom we depend and tried not to grin too nervously at the one revving the engine and in charge of the transponder.

The most obvious crew onboard are the women in the scullery who serve our (quite fancy) meals and keep the coffee coming. The cabins are very warm, and we are endlessly shedding and reclaiming layers of clothing as we move around the ship. Lynn tells me that there is an engineer whose task it is, among others, to adjust the amount of heat drawn from the engine and circulated through the air conditioning. It’s a job that requires regular monitoring of several thermometers and is one complicated by the fact that we are constantly opening doors to the deck (it is about seven degrees outside) and leaning out of porthole windows for the sheer joy of it.

I’d better go now, to stretch my legs before dinner and a lecture from Dan on Antarctic sea ice and glaciers. I might even squeeze in another cat-nap so that I don’t fall asleep behind the video camera during the lecture.

Until tomorrow,
Stephanie