Antarctica snuck up on us quietly.
As kids, my brother Kevin and I used to create our own mini White Continent by draping one of our mother’s white sheets over a series of cardboard boxes. Toy penguins scaled the boxy summits; plastic whales cruised around their base. There was also a rather stout stuffed walrus and a polar bear mother-cub duo — Arctic creatures, yes, but it would be a few years before our geography teachers set us straight on that score. We loved our little Antarctic world. But never in our wildest imaginings did we expect that, three decades later, we’d be experiencing the real thing.
On a foggy morning two days out from the Argentinian port town of Ushuaia, Kevin and I were standing in the sixth-deck bow lounge of the Seabourn Pursuit, binoculars at the ready. Our crossing of the notoriously rough Drake Passage had been smooth and uneventful, and now, after all that vast emptiness, we were determined to be the first to spot land.
And then, suddenly, unassumingly, there it was. The shores of Robert Island to starboard, and Nelson Island to port, serving as the enormous frozen gates of the South Shetland Archipelago. Thanks to a favorable tailwind, a pair of roll-reducing stabilizers, and a rather light two-meter swell, we had arrived almost a full day ahead of schedule.
