Southbound Drake Passage

The forecast for the Drake passage wasn’t looking all that great. We were attempting to go between two storms, with four meter seas in the forecast. The ship has stabilizers that help with rolling, but not much with pitch.

We got better weather than forecast. About three meter seas and intermittent drizzle. Many people used the patch for motion sickness, but some had reactions to it and had to remove it. We took Dramamine the first night and then didn’t take anything after that as we felt we didn’t need to. The staff considered it a fairly normal crossing.

I spent some time on the front top deck that was open, looking for seabirds in the light drizzle.

Once we got south of the South Shetland Islands, they couldn’t use the stabilizers because of ice, even the smaller pieces could damage them. So the ship rolled side to side more than on the Drake crossing.

Because the crossing was quicker with the tailwind, we stopped at Deception Island. They wanted to land at Whaler’s Bay just inside the entrance, but it was too windy, so we sailed around inside the large caldera, known as Port Foster, more than 8 miles across.

The weddell seal is the whiter seal. The fur seals are back and to the right.

We did see a large wandering albatross one afternoon, no photo since I didn’t have a camera with me at the time. It was near the ship for about 20 seconds.

Whale sightings are similar, a few seconds on the surface, then you may be lucky to see them once or twice more.