Start our way along the Beagle Channel.

Boarding the ship, meetings, dinner, and still more talks and safety rounds around Europa’s decks and inner spaces brought us to the end of the day and the beginning of a quiet night alongside Ushuaia pier. It was this morning, about 8:00h, when all was ready for departure. To sail off the Beagle Channel, and in fact to proceed in the inner waters of Patagonia, it is required to do so with a Pilot aboard. Once he is with us and the linesmen ready to let go our moorings, engines are turned on and off we go. Our Antarctic adventure is on the way.

The gangway is stowed away, decks squared up and tidied. Safety information and drill follow, a mandatory exercise to be done prior to departure on any sea voyage on a ship.

For the moment, the weather and seas are unbeatable for this part of the world. The sun shines, the wind is light, the seas flat. Anyway, this area of the world is well known for its rapidly changing and variable meteorology. But so far, and before any unexpected weather turn, it is all good to start with a day that will develop on trainings and familiarisations until the late afternoon, when we hit the open waters at the eastern mouth of the Beagle Channel that will bring us to the famed Drake Passage. Until then, we motor our way along the Beagle over calm seas and with just light airs blowing.

Nowadays a busy channel, a beautiful touristic area, a gateway for Antarctic voyages and good grounds for local fisheries, this waterway has a long human history. It has been used for more than 7,500 years by the Yaghan natives, who paddled all its coasts in their canoes. But we will have to wait until the 1800s for this corner of the world to be surveyed by the Europeans. It was during the two expeditions of the HMS Beagle, first with Pringle Stokes as Captain (1826–30) and then under the command of Robert Fitz Roy (1831–36). A second expedition most famous because aboard was the man who was about to change the way we all look at and understand the Natural World: Charles Darwin.

In the present, the channel plays a political role, representing the southern border between Chile and Argentina. And so it goes: the Chilean lands, peaks, and forests lay at our starboard side, while at port extend the Argentine southernmost shores of Tierra del Fuego.

And as the weather and sea conditions seem set to hold well along such a well-known channel, we take the opportunity to first start with the instructions for the always exciting climbing aloft. For the rest of the day, we all kept busy with the crew training everyone in steering, how to conduct a proper lookout, and how to manage and start understanding the maze of ropes and lines that crowd the rig and the pinrails on deck. A puzzle that will slowly build up and resolve (at least for the most interested ones in the sailing of a tall ship) during the next days. It will not take long after the Pilot disembarks and we face the oceanic waters before we will be hands-on with them, easing, pulling, hoisting, dousing canvas, and bracing the yards.

At the same time, we give a hand in getting the ship shaped for facing our crossing to Antarctica. Safety lines and nets are rigged, anchors secured, sea-stowing too everything that is loose both above and below decks.

Then, still under a light breeze at about 17:00h, the crew climbs aloft to start unfurling the first sails we are about to set. Topsails on both masts, followed by some of the lower staysails and inner jib. Outer jib and courses follow, but those latter ones are clewed back soon—there is not enough wind, and what little there is is not steady.

It is after midnight when the northwesterly picks up again, and we set more canvas as we start leaving behind the lee shore of the Wollaston Archipelago, which includes the various islands and islets between Navarino and Cape Horn. Now we start to face the Drake Passage, about 500 nm ahead of us of moody weather and seas through the legendary latitudes of the Furious 50s and the Screaming 60s.

An easy start of the voyage, a gradual introduction to sailing under a slow build-up of wind and sea state, nonetheless with an unwelcome and trying extra company… seasickness strikes soon this time, as soon as the ship starts feeling the swell in the open waters.