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An Antarctic Cruise

By: Hazel Keys

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Two nautical charts overlap on the ship's navigation table. Both charts show these waters have yet to be surveyed. Our captain maintains a safe course using depth soundings. He may be a seasoned Antarctic sailor, but he's never sailed this channel before today.

Dusk brings challenges to seeing, and then it starts to snow. The falling flakes quickly accumulate on the bridge windows. We can barely see the icebergs that fill the channel ahead. We luckily have radar, which shows us a safe route to follow. The screen is filled with various blobs of oranges, signifying icebergs. The monitor shows the channel nearly blocked by one gigantic orange blob. We are three kilometers from it.

The captain whispers an order with one kilometer left. The helmsman silently moves the wheel and the ship alters course. Fog and snow cloud our vision, but we see a spooky sight; the tabular iceberg, which can only be seen in the southern ocean, appears. The top is flat and extremely wide, and the sides can rise straight up over one hundred feet.

Antarctica has struck me speechless again. We are riding in a polar-class cruise vessel and are heading towards the Antarctic Circle. This is the imaginary line that circles the bottom of a globe. We'll pass some of the most desolate and inhospitable areas in this world as we travel. After being found in 1820, Antarctica waited another 79 years for a human to spend the winter there. Very soon after that first winter, explorers searched for the South Pole in a deadly quest, scientists followed them. It used to be that only very rich individuals could come to Antarctica, that's changed. Now, traveling to Antarctica costs a tourist just about as much as a Caribbean adventure would.

You can imagine that Antarctica looks like a manta ray with a curved tail. The very most northern tip of Antarctica is still 500 ocean miles from South America. Rough seas fill this space, which is known as the Drake Passage. Passing though these waters, which are also called the slobbering jaws of hell?, is the true price you'll pay to get to Antarctica. One nice woman reminds us to stow all of our gear and make sure our cabin portholes are well latched before we retire for the night.

After sailing from Ushuaia, in Argentina, we sailed through the Beagle Channel and reached the open ocean. Rough water bounced us to and fro for two days. We didn't see any land during that time. The wind approached gale force for the entire time. Waves that crashed across the bow of the ship caused spray to rocket past may fourth deck window. Depending on the level of your seasickness, you could see swells from 15 to 40 feet.

Two days out from South America brought us into the Southern Ocean. When I got up the next day, I saw a coastal archipelago. The sea seemed to be settled a bit by the surrounding land. Clouds dressed mile-high mountain peaks. The ridges stuck through the smooth glaciers at sharp angles. The ice goes right into the water in huge frozen slabs. They are crackled and bumpy, not smooth like the glaciers. It looks like a huge mountain range has been plopped into the middle of the ocean.

The trip to the continent is similar, according to one passenger, to the labor of childbirth. Like a naughty kid, Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, highest and driest of all the earth's continents. Though the surface holds seventy percent of the world's freshwater in reserve, Death Valley gets the same amount of precipitation as its polar plateau. This land is not owned, has no indigenous human groups, or animals that stay year round on it.

We have to rely upon the weather to plan where to sail or when and where to land on shore in this inclement area. We are able to make our originally-planned shore landing, though the guides have warned us this is usually not the case. The groups we've been assigned to meet on deck. An inflatable boat hauls my group of ten across the water. Our excitement builds as we cross the last quarter mile of water. Then, with that last step, I am finally standing on Antarctica. I am one of the few people who have been able to do so.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

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