Crossing the Scotia Sea
It’s a bright, beautiful day under a cloudless blue sky as we make our way out of the polar region and back into the southern temperate zone. For two weeks we have explored the realm of ice around the Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia, passing our days in the company of penguins, seals and whales, wandering through landscapes where forbidding mountains rise vertically from the sea, carved and crowned by the great glaciers that have dominated the southern continent for 20 million years.
Now everything around us is changing. We are leaving behind the deep seas of the Scotia Arc and coming up onto the Falklands Platform, a part of the South American continent. Already the air is warmer, and the sea as well; we have left the Southern Ocean and entered the South Atlantic. New seabirds like Great Shearwaters are winging over the waves around us.
For many travelers before us, this has been a change much to be desired. For whalers, explorers and early scientists, sailing to the Falklands meant leaving the dangers and rigors of the Antarctic for an outpost of civilization. Many ships, damaged in storms or groundings on uncharted shoals, limped into this archipelago in search of shelter, rest and repair. There is only a relative sort of safety to be found here; the winds still shriek around these lonely islands and many ships have been lost on their rocky shores, but nonetheless the Falklands have long been an important refuge for Antarctic sailors.
For us this is a bittersweet passage. We are eager to see the green hills and rich wildlife of the Falklands, but sad to bid farewell to our time in the far south. As we cruise today there is a contemplative mood on board our ship. Our minds turn back to the blue and white of the ice, the frenetic activity of the penguin rookeries, the ponderous majesty of surfacing whales. The Antarctic has been kind to us, sharing with us many of its wonders above and below the surface of the freezing sea, granting us priceless and irreplaceable gifts of experience and memory. The time has come, we must move on and leave the ice behind us, but we will never forget.
