More often than not, a cruise itinerary is more of a suggestion than a guarantee. Weather is usually the culprit, but on my month-long journey along Antarctica’s coast, it was a rescue mission that altered our course. I chronicled the five-and-a-half-day ordeal in Rescue at Sea, but at the time, I had no real sense of what our actual route looked like.
We spent days crunching through ice, reversing course twice before finally finding a navigable path to reach a fishing vessel with an injured crew member. It was a journey of persistence and uncertainty, guided as much by ice conditions as by our mission to help. Without our assistance, the crewman risked dying of gangrene.
Recently, I discovered a company that maps the actual routes of passenger ships dating back to 2017. Using their data, they created a physical map of our voyage—something I had long wished for but never imagined possible.
Looking closely at the map, you can see where the smooth route line turns jagged. Those sharp deviations mark our ship maneuvering around massive icebergs and crunching through pack ice. In one area, the map captures two failed attempts to reach the injured fisherman. Ultimately, the fishing vessel had to travel west through an open-water channel to meet us, as it wasn’t ice-worthy.
This is a common practice for such vessels—they time their arrival to fish for months, waiting until a viable route opens before attempting to leave the ice pack. In our case, it wasn’t about waiting; it was about finding a way to complete a rescue in one of the most remote and unforgiving places on Earth.
Interested in Antarctica?
See these posts: https://www.digitalrabbit.org/blog/categories/antarctica
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