A quest to discover the untamed outdoors and leave behind the everyday to encounter heavy pack ice, ski unclimbed peaks, and experience amazing wildlife, provided the driving force to head off on a new adventure into the unknown. The primary objective of this voyage was the far south of the Antarctic Peninsula near the Bellinghausen Sea, where we were likely to find those extraordinarily beautiful and pristine silent unclimbed peaks.
We set sail from Ushuaia to Antarctica on 31 December 2023. Our first destination was Puerto Williams, Chile to await a weather window for the Drake Passage. There was a New Year’s Eve party on the Micalvi, an old tug grounded in the port acting as a jetty for yachts. With views of the waterways of Tierra del Fuego and the surrounding mountain peaks, this seemed a fitting tribute for the start of a new year and the challenge of facing Mother Nature in Antarctica.
Departure from Cape Horn
The sail through the Drake Passage across the Southern Ocean was planned to take four days. We sailed early morning of 1 January with a few tired eyes after the previous evening. A fair WNW wind forged us onwards across Bahia Nassau. To starboard at around midnight we noted Cape Horn Light, the last navigational marker we would see until arriving back at Cape Horn weeks later. Into the Southern Ocean, the swell increased as did the wind, but nothing too extreme. With the yacht making
