Straits of Magellan and the Drake Passage

There are certain places on this planet that, as my younger self read and learned about the world from books, sounded just unbelievably exotic to me and are now a particular thrill to experience in person. I felt like that when I went to Borneo last year, and I felt that way again as the LMG began its pass through the Straits of Magellan and passed Cape Horn. I mean, come on: the freaking STRAITS OF MAGELLAN! This is some legendary age-of-exploration stuff here. And I was there! As the radar of the ship's location showed (the southern tip of South America on the left and Isla de los Estados on the right)...

...and then I went up on deck to experience first hand. That's the sun setting over Cape Horn behind me...

...and Isla de los Estados glowing in that setting sun on the other side of the ship.

Total peace and beauty.

I'm glad I appreciated it for everything it was worth, because already the waters were getting rockier, and the next couple days were something else. I was on so many sea-sickness meds and was so out of it from that and the constant movement that honestly the whole thing was a total blur. But here's a little bit of what it was like to go through the Drake.

At one point I walked into the galley as one of the first really big swells tossed us, and several bowls of fruit that had been on shelves above the tables all went soaring across the room and the fruit landed and started rolling everywhere. One of the ship's crew came in right behind me and I regret not having stopped to take a video of us trying to pick up all the fruit. Every time we would reach out for an apple or orange, the ship would roll and it would dart away from our hands. It took forever to clean up. I can tell you definitively, though, that prescription anti-nausea meds for sea-sickness (despite giving you terrible dry mouth and dilating your eyes so you can't see anything up close and making you too tired to focus on much of anything) WORK, even if they make you feel like a zombie.

The upper decks of the ship were closed while we were rocking and rolling through the worst of it--too much danger of someone getting tossed overboard, which would have been a death sentence. We did manage, though, to complete a Drake Passage survey--one of the science projects that happens on the LMG: every hour or so, we released sensors into the water that recorded temperature as they sank, plus we did water samples several times/day. There were multiple shifts of volunteers, so I signed up to help with that and am glad I did. That was a good excuse to get a couple breaths of fresh air and a legit reason for being briefly on deck as we held on tight for science!

Other than that, I just slept as much as I could through the worst of the Drake, which was certainly not even as bad as it could have been! I wish I had more pictures of it, but I was too out of it to be able to think about how to record the experience.