The first day at the Drake Passage
Variable weather, winds, and seas. We left yesterday’s swell, waves, strong gusty winds, rain and sleet behind. The sight of the open ocean in abating conditions replaced the scenery of snowy mountains above Ushuaia and all along the length of the Beagle Channel.
Wishing to visit Antarctica as our first destination, we made our way first along this waterway running through the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, then today we faced the famed Drake Passage.
The southern Patagonian open waters east of the Cape Horn Archipelago welcomed us last night with Southwesterly winds blowing hard. Now and then, we met squalls on our way, the ship heels to Portside, and the scoopers fill up with water. Not many were up to their night shifts, the seasickness struck hard during the dark hours.
But in the morning, the conditions abate, leaving the unusual (and wrong) initial impression of an easier start of the Drake but a rougher Beagle Channel. But we are on the regions of sudden weather and seas changes, characteristics well known and feared since the first Europeans ventured into these waters long ago in the 16th Century.
It was not until the year 1525 that the passageway between the southernmost tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula was first seen. It was the Spanish sailor Francisco de Hoces during the Loaísa Expedition to the Spice Islands as commander of the vessel San Lesmes who was blown off the Magellan Strait, southwards to the latitude of 56º S. There, the crew thought they had seen the land’s end. But we have to wait until 1578 when the famous British privateer Sir Francis Drake gained recognition after suffering the same fate as Francisco de Hoces more than 50 years before, being pushed off his route by a storm and sighting a vast expanse of water instead of a continuous coast towards the South. Tierra del Fuego was actually an island and thus, not connected to any other landmass. Later on, this ample waterway was named after him.
The passage had been found and reported, but nobody had sailed it yet. The first recorded voyage south of the southernmost tip of the Americas was in 1616, by the Dutch navigators William Schouten and Jacob Le Maire. The first ones to round the Horn and name it.
From our position when we begin dealing with the changeable weather and winds of the Drake Passage, Cape Horn lays out of sight to our starboard. In front of us, the first few days of our voyage on the open seas. The passage that today started with the crew preparing and setting more sail, with the help of a handful of the voyage crew that didn’t fall on the grasp of seasickness. Throughout the morning, the conditions change, leaving us first in a windless area that calls for clewing up Courses, Royals, and Desmond, sheet tight the staysails and start engines. But not for long. After midday, the wind comes back, and hands gather on deck to set all the Europa’s canvas but the Gaff Topsail.
But the grey and rainy day had not settled down with steady conditions yet. Stronger wind makes for dousing and furling the upper canvas, with the main deck and breezeways taking water as the ship heels to portside. EUROPA ends up like that, with a sail configuration that will last until the end of the day. A first journey in the Drake Passage of good sailing in its characteristic variable conditions.