MS National Geographic Explorer
Drake Passage
Sunday, January 10, 2010

    This was our first full day at sea. Saturday evening, we cast off from the dock at Ushuaia, Argentina, in Tierra del Fuego about 6:30 pm (2130 UTC). We were running about 30 minutes late waiting for our mandatory pilot to arrive.

    Earlier in the day, before boarding the N.G. Explorer, we had lunch on a catamaran while cruising the Beagle Channel near Ushuaia. The photo to the right is of a sea lion I photographed on a small island in the channel.

    Once under way, the National Geographic Explorer found, as usual, that the Beagle Channel was calm with a little rain. We had the normal emergency drill starting about 15 minutes after leaving dock, followed by an introduction to the crew. It was nice to see a lot of the crew I knew from previous trips and to have them recognize me as well. Many of the crew call me Sir Richard, which is kind of a hoot. Dinner was buffet style last night and following dinner we were introduced to the naturalists and other experts for this expedition.

    Most of us were fairly tired after the trip to Ushuaia from Santiago and all of the day’s activities, so I like many hit the sack about 11 pm. I find the bunks on the Explorer very comfortable and I had a great sleep, awakening at about 5 am.

    Other than the ship’s crew, not much was going on at 5:30 am when I went out on deck. I found that there was a group of four wandering albatrosses flying behind and around the ship. They are such magnificent birds with wingspans of about 11 feet. You can’t appreciate their size until they fly very near the railings of the ship since it is hard to have a size reference over the wide-open ocean.

    I spent about two hours on the bridge with a couple of the naturalists that had lookout duty. We spotted a number of whale spouts near the horizon, watched a whale swim just along the side of the ship just under the surface, and several petrels, including the wandering albatross, giant southern petrel, blue petrels, and diving petrels. Later in the day we also had a number of cape petrels (pentados) circling the ship.

    Since this was a sea day, it offered time for several presentations from the staff, including a workshop from the photographers (Bob Smith and National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry, a presentation on southern ocean birds, and the geology of the southern continent. There was also the mandatory briefing on expedition landings and the regulations regarding landing procedures and shore procedures designed to protect the fragile Antarctic environment and wildlife.

    We were lucky today to have a calm sea – the “Drake Lake”, which means the swells were only about eight feet or so. It is also hard to predict how the crossing will be. One advantage of the calm seas and low winds are that we were making about 14-15 knots. That means that we should reach the Shetland Islands in Antarctica late tomorrow morning. Our first destination will be Deception Island, a volcano that last erupted in 1969 wiping out Chilean British bases. The caldera broke open to the sea a long, long time ago and has acted as a natural safe harbor for ships that enter via Neptune’s Bellows. We will have our first landings via Zodiac on Deception, tomorrow.

    At 6:15 pm tonight (2115 UTC) we were at S 59-30.422, W 64-07.972 heading 150 degrees magnetic at 14 knots.