Drake Passage, Beagle Channel
It was indeed a dark and stormy night, to borrow that famous opening line from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s gothic Victorian novel. Until the small hours of the morning the Endeavour had been making smooth running northward across the Drake Passage, with gently rolling seas, floating albatrosses and fair skies all around; such an easy ride in fact that some of the passengers were starting to hope for a little more action from the notorious stretch of water below Cape Horn. After the relatively tame crossing earlier, on the way south to Antarctica, they wanted a salty taste of rounding the cape. In that they certainly weren’t shortchanged. All afternoon the weather charts had been showing a deep low pressure system creeping up behind us from the south and by midnight the Endeavour was pitching and rolling in a heavy slanting rain. Winds and seas continued to rise until by three o’clock in the morning the bridge was reporting Force 10 gales and 25-foot waves, and the course was altered, away from Cape Horn and towards the shelter of the outlying islands near the mouth of the Beagle Channel. It was a fast-moving front and breakfast time found the ship moving easily again, out of reach of the storm, and a ship full of now-satisfied Cape-rounding mariners exchanging tales of bouncing beds and lurching cabins, as the forested hills of Tierra del Fuego slipped past the dining room windows and the Endeavour made its way towards Ushuaia.
It was indeed a dark and stormy night, to borrow that famous opening line from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s gothic Victorian novel. Until the small hours of the morning the Endeavour had been making smooth running northward across the Drake Passage, with gently rolling seas, floating albatrosses and fair skies all around; such an easy ride in fact that some of the passengers were starting to hope for a little more action from the notorious stretch of water below Cape Horn. After the relatively tame crossing earlier, on the way south to Antarctica, they wanted a salty taste of rounding the cape. In that they certainly weren’t shortchanged. All afternoon the weather charts had been showing a deep low pressure system creeping up behind us from the south and by midnight the Endeavour was pitching and rolling in a heavy slanting rain. Winds and seas continued to rise until by three o’clock in the morning the bridge was reporting Force 10 gales and 25-foot waves, and the course was altered, away from Cape Horn and towards the shelter of the outlying islands near the mouth of the Beagle Channel. It was a fast-moving front and breakfast time found the ship moving easily again, out of reach of the storm, and a ship full of now-satisfied Cape-rounding mariners exchanging tales of bouncing beds and lurching cabins, as the forested hills of Tierra del Fuego slipped past the dining room windows and the Endeavour made its way towards Ushuaia.
