December 23, 2021
When we awoke the first morning on the ship, we had already entered the Drake Passage and were south east of Cape Horn. Overnight, we covered 152 nautical miles, with 3521 meters (2.18 miles) of water beneath us. Air temperature is 48F and winds were 15 knots (17 mph). Water temperature is 41F. Huge swells rocked us back and forth. Walking around in our tiny cabin is difficult. Anything you could hang onto was fair game. Seriously, it’s like bouncing around in a carnival fun house. You couldn’t stand on one leg long enough to step into your pant legs.
We hung our gear on the wall hooks. As I lay in my bunk, I watched them sway back and forth like a pendulum on a grandfather clock.
Sea Sickness
When we stepped out of our cabin, I noticed white paper bags wedged behind the hallway railings. Hmm… didn’t see that yesterday. Turns out many passengers got sea sick and not many showed up for breakfast.
The dining room has booths and tables. The booths were attached to the floor, as were the tables. However the chairs were not secured. The sea rocked the boat so ferociously, that my chair slid across the floor into the next booth….with me sitting in it! This happened again and again until I decided to hang on to the table with one hand while I ate my food with the other.
Matt and I are both feeling okay, probably because we applied our motion sickness patches a day prior to embarking in Ushuaia. That gave the medicine time to enter our system, before we needed it. Those patches work for about 72 hours, which is just enough to get us to calmer water.
We had a mandatory briefing after breakfast and many showed up looking green and carrying those white paper bags. Some even put them to good use during the briefing. The crew offered words of encouragement, telling us we will all start feeling better soon.
