Tour with Bob and Elizabeth: Cape Horn

Saturday January 18. Sailing to Antarctica

As I’m writing this, the ship is rolling side to side in fairly heavy seas. We’ve had so-so weather as we’ve been travelling south towards Antarctica. We sailed out of Punta Arenas down the Straits of Magellan towards the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia (oo-shy-ah). We’ve have a lot of very cloudy days. Off and off rain and fog. And periodically we see the sun. Our first real sight is the Témpanos Glacier. The blue ice is caused by the weight of the ice literally pushing the oxygen out of the ice and the ice turns blue.

Friday we cruised down the Beagle Channel which separates Chile from Argentina. The channel is named for the ship, The Beagle, on which Charles Darwin sailed as a supernumerary (a paying volunteer crew member). There are five big glaciers along here. And we’ve rain periodically. And fog. You’ll see some of the photos look out of focus. That’s the fog and rain. The glaciers are quite imposing and the sun kept appearing behind us as we sailed the channel. But they are still imposing. Hopefully I don’t have too many duplicates in there. I’m doing this now because I’ve got a good solid internet connection. When we hit the Antarctic we’ll lose the satellite connection.

Once past the glaciers we went for breakfast and I couldn’t wait to get out again because the sun came out behind us. And so there are a lot of photos in the sun and wind. And I’ve got my first bird photo. It’s not great but it’s just the first this trip. Our trip ends at Ushuaia the southernmost city in the world. Just don’t talk to someone from Chile because they have a town further south, but it’s not big enough to be a city. In Ushuaia we took a tour down to the “end of the world” or the end of the Pan American highway. It is possible to drive from the northernmost point in Alaska right down here. It’s about 17,000 km. We stopped at Encinada which, even with the weather, has a nice appeal to the landscape photographer in me. And once we hit the end of the road, it was a walk on the boardwalk out to the end of the bay.

This morning it was cold. It was windy. It was raining. (Sounds like a bad mystery novel?) But we had left the Beagle Channel and had sailed to Cape Horn which was defending its reputation as one of the most dangerous sailing channels in the world. There is a family which lives on the cape for a year and is paid by the Chilean government. The current family has two children there. The seas were so bad we didn’t get very close, unlike the other ship here.