The only way to get across The Drake Passage I’ve decided is to lie on your bunk and will it to all be over as soon as possible and the only thing worse than hugging your bed to stay on it through the relentlessly enormous waves is the crawl on all fours to the bathroom. It really can be anywhere between ghastly and absolutely terrifying.

The thing is that South America is the closest land to the Antarctic and so crossing the 800 kilometers between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands is it seems the price you pay to get to Antarctica and some sheltered bays. Mind you it is absolutely worth it.

The Drake Passage is where the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern Oceans converge and run or are swept clockwise from west to east around the Antarctic. There is no land closer to the Antarctic so the huge current flows unimpeded at about 4 kilometers per hour pushed along by the westerly winds, carrying 150 times the volume of all the rivers in the world as it goes.

I used to think the roaring 40’s was the wild, fun times between the wars. How wrong I was. The roaring forties are the very strong westerly winds between forty and fifty degrees south before you are hit by the furious fifties which don’t ever prepare you for the screaming sixties.

However all that praying and willing and promising to be good obviously worked because after about thirty six hours we were alongside Elephant Island. This is where Ernest Shackleton and his twenty eight exhausted crew sought refuge in 1916 after the loss of their ship “Endurance” in the the Weddell Sea ice. This was their camp for four months while Shackleton and five of his men sailed off in their open lifeboat the “James Caird” to find help in South Georgia, 1,287 kilometers away.

OK, so remembering that unbelievable expedition put me well and truly in my place and I resolved never to put myself to bed in rough seas again.