Crossing the Antarctic Circle on the Ocean Diamond with Quark Expeditions

We left Ushuaia, Argentina (54.48S 68.18 W) at 6:30PM on Saturday, January 16, 2016 and crossed the Antarctic Circle 66.33 S on Tuesday, January 19 a distance of about 900 miles.

 Ushuaia, Fin del mundo, the End of the World, known as the most southernmost city in the world. Actually we saw a town further south when cruising the Beagle Channel on the Chilean side of the channel, don't know the population but maybe it was not large enough to count.

 View from our room of the dock of the very busy port. It was even more crowded on our return.

Our home for the duration. It was about the same size as the hotel room we had overnight in Ushuaia. There was plenty of storage in the closets across from the bathroom for clothes and rigid suitcases. The bathroom had plenty of shelves and contained storage to keep things from escaping when the ship was swaying.

Argentine side of the Beagle Channel on our journey south to open waters and the dreaded Drake Passage.

 The Ocean Diamond had an Open Bridge Policy, we were all allowed to visit he bridge any time unless the Pilot was guiding the ship to or from Ushuaia. We were surprised at some of the less than modern control panels.

We left the relative calm of the Beagle Channel sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday, January 17. We knew it, felt it and heard it, needless to say didn't get a lot of sleep that night. On the cruise down we had seas with 12 to 15 foot waves and winds of 40 MPH. We both used the patch and neither of us had any symptoms of seasickness.

 Now there was nothing to be seen off the Starboard side (right).

 And nothing off the Port side (left) either. By this time the waves were settling down, but the Drake Passage could not be called the Drake Lake (very calm passage) yet.

 Nothing ahead. It was like this for almost 2 days. On our first 2 days we were kept busy with getting kitted out with our boots and parkas and listening to lectures by marine biologists and having mandatory drills.

 January 18 we saw our first iceberg.

 On Tuesday, January 19 at 7:15 AM we crossed the Antarctic Circle. We had a visit from King Neptune who read a proclamation and was baptizing and tattooing (a rubber stamp of a trident) visitors to his icy realm and then we all toasted with champagne.

The plan was to have entered Marguerite Bay south of Adelaide Island and proceed north through Laubeuf Fjord then through the Gullet and explore on Zodiacs somewhere along the way,

but the bay was iced in.

Instead, our first Zodiac cruise was as close as we could get. It was a windy day and the seas were rough and there was plenty of salty sea spray to go around for everyone.

 Our first seals seen, Crab-eaters, though they don't really eat crabs, they mainly eat krill.

Our first Penguin seen, an Adélie, Pygoscelis adeliae, named by a French Explorer after his wife. No other birds are known to breed further south. Their main food source is also krill, but also eat squid and small fish.