Raging Seas Crossing the Drake Passage En Route to Antarctica

The waters of the Beagle Channel were smooth and most of the passengers on the Professor Multanovskiy, a Russian research vessel converted for expeditionary travel, were asleep wondering what the famous Drake would give us during the night. Well, it did not take long to find out! Soon after leaving our pilot behind at the end of the Beagle Channel, we entered the Drake. The winds were fierce, over 40 knots (1 knot = 1 nautical mile per hour; one nautical mile = 1.15 statute miles), with swells and crashing waves up to 8 metres high. For most of the passengers the experience was a new (and very unpleasant) one. In the morning, while the waves and swell continued to hit the Professor Multanovskiy, the ship was quiet (a ghost ship in fact). About 40 of the 46 passengers were in their bunks with sick bags at the ready. What a horrible feeling to be sea sick.

The distance between the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica is huge as is the distance from Australia and New Zealand to the southern-most continent. But, if you were to look at the southern tip of South America, Cape Horn, and measure the distance to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, you would see that although it is 1000 km from land to land this is still the shortest distance from any of the continents to Antarctica – a sort of bottle neck. Add into that equation the world’s largest oceanic current that circles Antarctica in a clock-wise direction (the Antarctic Circumpolar Current) as well as the waters in the Pacific that are trying to squeeze eastward through that same narrow section of ocean, the Drake Passage, and you have the makings of a wild and ferocious section of ocean. And that is just what it is!

Black-browed Albatross, Drake Passage