Drake Lake or Drake Shake?
That is ALWAYS the question everyone asks when addressing the Captain or the Officers at this stage of the trip. If you would like to know more about Drake Passage, here’s a link to The Explorer’s Passage post on its history.
How dangerous is the Drake Passage? There are more than a few Drake Passage shipwrecks: more than 800 ships are believed to have succumbed to its waters, tragically claiming the lives of some 20,000 sailors in the process.
However, modern day ships and hulls, like the Oosterdam we’re cruising on, along with it’s stabilizing technology and systems, combined with state-of-the-art navigation and doppler-radar weather systems, are really not particularly dangerous with a good Captain.
VERDICT: After sailing nearly the entire day of the 16th and indeed the full day of the Drake Passage, I am happy to announce we experienced…
DRAKE LAKE!
Indeed we were fortunate and can only hope for the same when we have to return though the passage going back North, a week from now. The last cruise ship to get into serious distress in Drake Passage was in 2010 and with two cruises a year from Holland America to Antarctica, that means there hasn’t been a major distress incident like in the video below, in the last 26 trips to Antarctica from Ushuaia, Argentina. Thank you Mother Nature. No FOMO here.
The most recent dramatic Drake Passage engine failure occurred to Clelia II in 2010. The ship was returning to Ushuaia in extremely rough seas, with wave heights of 30 feet and sustained winds at 55 miles per hour, when a wave hit the bridge deck and broke a window. Water ingress disabled the communication system and brought one engine down. The National Geographic Explorer responded to a radio call for help and escorted the ship back to Ushuai. A passenger on the Explorer took the footage below as the ship limped along in huge seas. (In the video, the Explorer is transferring a satellite phone to the Clelia II because theirs had run out of minutes.)
We end Day 1 in the Drake Passage uneventful and are expecting tomorrow’s full day in the passage to be ‘lake’ conditions as well. Trina and I took turns taking pic’s of each other at dinner and thought this might be a nice way to end today’s image captures.
Tomorrow is Day 2 in the Drake Passage and then the Bellinghausen Sea. We still have a full day at sea and an overnight before arriving in Antarctica. However, we do see our first icebergs tomorrow night!