The Young Explorers had a blast playing Final Jeopardy in the lounge to see just how much they learned about Antarctica!

Solitaire is the card game of choice when you can’t find anyone else to play with!

The Drake Passage was calm all day and guests enjoyed lunching on the pool deck.

The library is the perfect place for a lively game of Scrabble on a sea day!

As Le Boreal entered the Beagle Channel late in the day, the fog rolled in along with a light rain, neither of which prevented passengers from being on deck.

Drake Passage and Beagle Channel

1/3/2011

The sun shone and the swells diminished, turning the notorious Drake Passage into the 'Drake Lake'.  

Historian Bob Burton reminisced on "When I was a lad: Two Years in Antarctica". Bob had worked at the British Antarctic Survey station on Signy Island in the mid-1960s (the same station that Russ Manning commanded in the 1990s) and gave a lighthearted account of a very simple, rather idyllic life in a small, very isolated and (technically) primitive community of young men.  

In the afternoon Cruise Director Jannie Cloete giving the important, if unwelcome, briefing about the arrangements and procedures that will enable a smooth disembarkation and onward travel after our arrival at Ushuaia. More entertaining was the preview of the DVD that has been made of the expedition and will be available for sale.  

There was time to spend on deck having a last view of the albatrosses that having been enlivening our sea passage. The last formal gathering to watch a slide show prepared by the Expedition Staff that recalled many of the highlights of the cruise. We had made landings on the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, and we have had shipboard experiences of whales, albatrosses and icy landscapes. So much has happened in a short space of time that it took many slides to do the experience justice!  

During the evening, Le Boreal came into the shelter of land, took on a pilot and steamed back up the Beagle Channel. Ushuaia was reached not long after 9.00pm. So ended our cruise to Antarctica. We will leave tomorrow to go our separate ways – perhaps to meet again aboard one day.