Alistair Baillie.co.uk

I have made it finally to Ushuaia, for those who like me had never heard of the place, its basically the furthest south, reasonably sized, piece of civilisation on the South American continent and homeport for most of the smaller Antarctica cruise and expedition vessels.

Since my last enter, a long time ago, I have crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, sailed down the coast to Uruguay, up the river Plate to Buenos Aires, across to the Falkland Islands, then South Georgia and finally down south to Antarctica.

Antarctica for those of you who have never been is very cold, its also quite pretty, with lots of ice bergs and glaciers everywhere and it certainly was interesting dodging in and out of all the ice bergs and other pieces of floating ice.

Getting back to the title, I have now visited 5 of the 7 continents of the world, namely; Europe, North America, South America, Africa and the latest Antarctica, with me having gone ashore at Paradise Bay to climb up a big hill, take some photos and slide back down it.

The weather in Antarctica itself is reasonably good, the seas are nice and calm, even if it is snowing and blowing a gale – the crossing from Antarctica to South America however is a totally different story, with last night being very interesting rolling and pitching over to 23 degrees during my watch and even more randomly throughout the early hours of the morning.

I am also leaving Minerva in 10 days, to fly home just before Christmas so I will post some photos some time after that.

As I write this we are now approaching the Brazilian coast, having sailed from Funchal eight days ago. The crossing has been very uneventful with not much to say really, our GPSs seem to think its 1993 – apparently its a software fault so we’ve been having to work out required speed and ETA’s the hard way for the past week, but they should be fixed tomorrow when we arrive into Recife.

The ‘Crossing the line’ ceremony was yesterday afternoon and I ended up covered in random food stuffs and in the pool… pictures will follow at some point on FaceBook.

Once we get to Brazil we will be heading south to Argentina and then off to Antarctica for the next couple of months. I am only doing 2 of the Antarctica cruises before I leave to fly home just before Christmas but it should be good fun.

Well I flew out to my first ship on the 1st of October as a qualified officer, I am now onboard the small cruise ship MV Minerva sailing the Eastern Mediterranean and over the next few weeks making our way across the Atlantic to Brazil and Argentina before heading south, down to Antarctica for the UK ‘winter months’.

Minerva is a considerably smaller ship than what I am used too, she’s only around 12,000 GT and carries a very small 350 passengers (less than 200 when in Antarctica) and only 150 officers, staff and crew.

There isn’t much else to say, I had a 3 day handover period in Istanbul, before she sailed for the Greek & Turkish Islands. I am on the 8-12 watch and this cruise have a small number of the arrivals and departures, but mainly she is either already in port, or at sea when I come onto the bridge.

Coming from far larger ships, I was at first surprised to find that you can actually adjust the speed without the engines throwing a fit and de-clutching if you so much as looked at the CPP controls. You can also do reasonably large turns without the fear of listing the ship over and knocking everything flying.

Anyway, that is all there really is to say, I will at some point take some pictures, though I probably wont upload anything until I am home as the internet on this ship is not particularly good!