Drake Passage and Cape Horn
0600: Calm sea, grey sky. Position 54¢ª 40’S, 068¢ª 31’W. Air temperature 41¢ªF.
The water and sky around the ship are alive with albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters. We are approaching the isolated island Isla Diego Ramirez, the furthest south inhabited island in the Americas.
This lonely outpost is maintained by the Chilean Navy, and lies 56 miles further south than Cape Horn. Amongst the old sailors who diced with death here on an annual basis, braving the terrible storms of the Drake, it was known, with wry understatement, as “Dig-in-the-Ribses.” At wake-up call before breakfast, the Captain took the ship so close to the island that we could both hear and smell the teeming colonies of Rockhopper penguins, Black-browed and Grey-headed albatrosses, as gangs of fur seals gamboled in the kelp fringes of the shore.
After breakfast we are steaming full ahead towards Cape Horn in an eerily calm sea…will the old Lindblad Luck hold?
Around 10:30, with a light, overcast sky we approached the “Cabo de Hornos” (Cape Horn), a dramatic cliff at the southern end of South America, where the tail of the Andes plunges into the ocean. All guests and staff were out on the deck to view this infamous landmark where so many mariners have perished in the furious storms which brew here. Eric the Young, (staff) gave us a short history of the place and read the beautiful poem by Sarah Vidal, “Soy el Albatros,” which commemorates those legions of sailors lost at sea in these ferocious waters.
Later on we set course for the wide rugged peninsula of Tierra del Fuego, the last wilderness of mainland formed where the slender length of Chile curls back east to form the tail of South America. Along the way we passed huge flocks of Sooty Shearwaters until we finally turned into the shelter of the Beagle Channel. Our trip has ended as it began, in bright sunshine and calm seas, and as the evening ended we steamed peacefully west for our final landfall at Ushuaia.
