Drake Passage

For a welcome change, we wake up to a cloudy but dry morning that gradually gives way to a beautiful sunny day and a starry night.

A day of shifting winds too. It blows from the northwest, west, west by south, west, northwest. The wind meter reads 15, 5, 3, 10, and 18 kn along the journey. A situation that keeps us busy on deck and aloft, hands on gaskets, sheets, halyards, downhauls, clews, and bunts.

It is time to start setting some canvas. In the early hours some staysails are hoisted. Just before midnight a couple of the lower ones were set, and soon after followed the spanker and the rest of the lower and middle ones.

In the morning, crew and voyage crew are to be found aloft unfurling topsails. With the help of many, and as a sail-training explanation, they are sheeted down and hoisted too, but not for long, as they still don’t hold when trying to steer too close to the wind, so they are taken away.

The afternoon finds us striking the rest of the canvas and packing it, with the exception of the spanker, fore topmast staysail, and main topgallant staysail.

After the wind has eased down to almost nothing, later on it starts to increase. Now it blows at 15 kn, allowing us to set lower and middle staysails again.

But the best moment comes after dinner. We have been motoring and motor-sailing now long and high enough in the wind to finally set more sail again and stop the engine work. Before midnight, braced sharp on port tack, all the squares are up and, together with the lower and middle staysails and full headrig and spanker, pull us at a good speed northwards.

A day that bears witness to the doings during a voyage to Antarctica in Europa. It is not all about being there, but it is also about the way to get to and come back from the southern continent. When the Antarctic coastline is left behind, when the last mountains and islands disappear on the horizon, the trip is not over yet, but we enter a different chapter of our journey: the sailing of an old tall ship across the famous waters of the Drake Passage. An integral part of the trip, a learning and teaching sailing experience, a shared effort for the accomplishment of the goal—first to reach the icy waters and lands of penguins, seals, and whales, and then to safely return to the southernmost city of the world.

Pull and ease ropes, sweat and climb, and today, as the weather gives us a truce from the rain and clouds, letting the sun shine, it also gives us the chance to take the sextants off their boxes and introduce those around to the art of celestial navigation.

For a while we lift our eyes from the screens of modern global positioning systems and, through the sextant, look at the sun at the moment when it shines at its highest in the sky. Hands on the astronavigation instrument, some of us try to take this “sight,” measuring the angle of the celestial body to the horizon. The easiest to take and the most used from old times are these measurements, called “noon sights,” as they give us straight away a latitude line.

A dry, warmer day. The sun is out and, when in the evening it goes below the horizon, it gifts us with the rare phenomenon of a green flash.

As the small segment of the upper part of the sun’s disc disappears, a small area of it turns emerald green for only a fraction of a second. A sunset phenomenon related to the refraction of the last rays of sunlight transmitted from the upper limb of the sun before reaching the observer’s eye.