Antarctic Peninsula and Polar Circle 2020 Feb 10 2020 -13

Northward Bound
20 February 2020 – Drake Passage
A quiet and relaxed sea day on the Ocean Atlantic.
After our last landing and leaving the South
Shetlands yesterday, we hit the Drake Passage
again, making our way back to Ushuaia.
The Southern Ocean, and the Drake in particular is
known as one of the roughest oceans one can sail
through, but for our first day sailing back, the
ocean was gentle to us and we had a Drake Lake…
which means not very strong winds or rough seas.
We had West and North West winds, of 18 to 25
knots from the morning to the late afternoon.
Really good conditions for our vessel and it was
also possible to conduct our educational program
of the day.
In the morning we were not woken up by Sam’s
voice, thus the day started with a very well
deserved later morning and breakfast in the
Restaurant. It was nice to unwind a little after all
the active days with the Zodiacs and landings.
The educational program started with Steve´s seal
lecture, a very good summary and explanations to
learn more and understand better the life of the
different seal species that we have seen during
our trip.
After lunch, the knowledge program continued
with two more lectures. One more wildlife lecture
about Whale communication, by Isabelle, and also
a personal experience lecture by Marta, about
how it is to sail to Antarctica on a sailing boat. In
between the presentations we had a little culinary
fun up in the Bistro making dumplings, which we
later enjoyed as part of the many dinner options.
At 18:15 the Expedition Team offered the
traditional recap, with Sam’s weather forecast for
our next day on the Drake, and Ted and Ab
introduced us two other organizations that
Albatros is collaborating to raise funding and
awareness: HookPod is trying to avoid the
increasing number of albatross being hooked up
on fishing lines; and South Georgia Heritage Trust
which is running a very successful Rat Eradication
Program on the whole island of South Georgia.
The recap brought us into dinner time but the
educational day was not over yet!
Rose awaited us in the Viking Theatre, to test the
knowledge and learning of guests and Expedition
Staff with an Antarctic Quiz. Several teams of 3 to
5 people gather together for the Quiz and 3 of
them got a very valuable scored of 29 / 30! A final
tricky question about eruption dates in Deception
island was needed to have only one final winner
group, that was rewarded with a free drink in our
Bar.
32
From a political point of view, we left Antarctica
after passing the 60ºS between 12:00 and 13:00h,
but we have crossed Antarctica’s biological
border, known as the Antarctic Convergence, at
around 18:00h.
10-22 FEB 2020
Volume 2, Issue 13