Drake Passage

Luxury travel companies such as Audley Travel offer tailor made trips, which can include whale watching, tracing some of history's most intrepid explorers to Drake's Passage and Elephant Island, a walk among penguin colonies, a swim in thermal springs, or simply enjoying the silence.

The crossing from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Antarctica is known as Drake's Passage.

After a mercifully calm night I awoke to find Drake's Passage smooth as silk, and a dozen or more black-browed albatross soaring above us.

A few days earlier on the other side of the Pole, four crew members on board another luxury ship, Silver Explorer, were treated for injuries when a giant wave in Drake's Passage swamped the bridge.

From Ushuaia, after a two-day crossing of 900 nautical miles of the world's roughest sea infamously called Drake's passage, they will arrive on the peninsula of Antarctica.

This was followed by a five-day voyage on a Russian icebreaker across the roughest seas on Earth, through Drake's Passage and around treacherous Cape Horn to the Antarctic peninsula.

Just across the waters of Drake's Passage lay Cooper Island, and there the Flying Cloud awaited the Amazing Grace' s services.

Having mapped the remote area they will now focus their activities on Elephant Island, some 300 miles to the north, before their returning across the treacherous Drake's Passage towards Cape Horn.

Another member of the expedition, Capt Will Mace, 27, from Huntington, Herefordshire, is one of the team's more experienced sailors and was frequently at the helm as the yacht pitched and rolled across Drake's Passage.

It will then take the expedition a further two days to cross Drake's Passage before sailing down the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.