Dake Passage

After an adventure day yesterday in the Falklands, today was wonderful for sleeping late and listening to lectures on Antarctica and Patagonia. We expected to have bruises from  the Land Rover through the “camp” as the mountains and bog are called. Only a bit sore, no bruises, and soooo worth it! We can’t describe how thrilling it was to be among thousands of penguins yesterday. We hope you saw the photo we put on our blog. Today the internet is down due to snow in the North East where the uplink site is. I hope to post this blog Thursday if the signal is strong enough.  We went up to the top deck of the ship last night to look for the Southern Cross, but it was too cloudy. The farther south we go, the window of darkness gets very short, but we’ll keep looking. We saw our first albatross flying around the ship today.

It’s 9:30 PM here and we are just about to cross the 60^th parallel. They tell us we will then be “expeditioners” rather than “passengers” at that point in the Antarctic waters.  We’ve been in the Drake Passage (the wide channel between Cape Horn and Antarctica) all day and happily the sea is calm (very rare). We have our fingers crossed it will stay that way. It is raining and we also hope that will clear by morning. We have the alarm set for 4:30 AM to get up and be ready to see our first landfall of Antarctica at Elephant Island. You may recall that is where, after 497 days trapped in the ice pack and not touching land, Shakelton and 28 survivors landed. We are beyond excited! The next three days will be sailing the Antarctic peninsula as the iced and weather allow. We should see our first icebergs tomorrow along with lots of wildlife. We are beyond excited!