What is a day like in the Drake Passage?

What is a day like in the Drake Passage?

They say that you can have a “Drake Lake” or a “Drake Shake”, but either way you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy from the different activities and presentations your expedition team will offer you while crossing this mythic passage.

Right after breakfast, our expedition photographer invited us to join him in the main lounge to give us all the tips regarding bird photography! Many seabirds follow the ship on its way down and up the Drake Passage so you better know the photography basics to make the best out of your time on the decks.

After the presentation, naturalists were out on decks to help us spot and identify birds and whales. Other members of the expedition team invited us to take part on a variety of citizen science projects.

Binoculars for Antarctica expeditions are a ‘must have’ to take a closer look at the beautiful wildlife and icebergs along the way!

At midday the restaurant staff have everything ready for us to enjoy another delicious meal.

Lunch is served from 12:30 to 2:00pm and afterwards we had some free time before the next presentation or activities started. This time, the crew and staff invited us to join them at the Bistro for a Dumpling making. Chefs and staff helped us get ready with our aprons and hats before explaining us how to make them. With good music and great company and guiding making the dumplings was not a hard task, but you do need some practice if you want to make them appealing! The idea is that we all eat them for dinner along with all the other options the chefs prepared for us.

 

Another day on the Drake Passage our expedition crew taught us how to fold towels!

 

In the meantime, some of the passengers were cozy and comfortable at the cafeteria sharing some hot beverages, playing cards and discussing the many ways the same game can be played depending on your nationality. Time for alliances and rivalries, but in the end, we are all –literally- on the same ship!

Everybody loved teatime -delicious cakes and scones tempted more than one every afternoon and being on these cold latitudes one can indulge a craving for sweets!

Our creative Freestyle travelers organized a treasure hunting and we were all in to some explore and discovery. This was almost a quiz on how well do you know your ship and guaranteed we do some exercise after so much eating!

At 6:00pm we had a wonderful lecture on Oceanography and our expedition leader invited us to join her at the daily “recap + plans for tomorrow” talk!

After dinner, some went to the bar to have some drinks and chat all about travel and remote destinations while others participated in the Trivia Game the team prepared for us. Some nights at the main theatre, we had wildlife documentaries + popcorn, Trivia games organized by our expedition staff, games such as Bingo or Stop (word categories game) organized by our amazing host!