The growth of 'adventure cruising'

They had paid more than £4,000 each for an adventure in the Antarctic Ocean. Last night the 24 Britons who had kept their spirits up by telling Titanic jokes as they drifted for hours in icy waters must have felt that they had got their money’s worth.

The ship on which they were awoken by a loud bang soon after midnight became the focus of a huge rescue operation off King George Island involving the Chilean Navy and coastguards from Argentina, Britain and America.

With 67 fellow passengers, nine “expedition staff” and the 54 crew on board the stricken MV Explorer, they had been hustled into lifeboats at the crack of the polar dawn to float on a freezing sea beside the iceberg that crippled their vessel. Hours later, the abandoned cruise liner sank.

The passengers and crew were picked up by a Norwegian cruise liner five hours later. A minor international wrangle followed over whose base on King George Island should have the honour of receiving them. King George Island, the largest of the South Shetland Islands, is disputed territory. The Chilean Navy wanted them to be transferred to Chile and the Argentine contingent thought that they should go to Argentina, where the cruise began on November 11.

Safe and snug in the gym of the Chilean base on the island, Bob Flood, a British member of the expedition team on board the Explorer, recalled the ordeal. “After midnight we were going through a lot of ice,” Mr Flood, from the Isles of Scilly, told The Times. “There was a lot of crunching. It did not seem to be anything out of the ordinary, but there was one big bang. A passenger shortly after reported water on the lower decks.”

As the ship began listing, passengers were called to the muster station at about 1am. “Then the electricity cut out and we lost the engine,” Mr Flood went on. “At that time a large iceberg came and lodged itself on the starboard side of the boat. That would have prevented us launching the life boats. At 3 o’clock an order was given to abandon ship. A general Mayday went out.”

No one panicked, and the passengers were in high spirits. “We knew there were ships not too far off,” Mr Flood said. “There was a lot of joke-telling. It’s the most bizarre thing that people tell Titanic jokes.”

Andrea Salas, 38, a crew member, told a radio station in Argentina: “I was in the bar after midnight, with my colleagues and some passengers, when I saw people from the lower cabins, wet and shouting, ‘There’s water’.”

There was a hole “about the size of a fist” and a crack in the hull, GAP Adventures, the tour operator, said yesterday. Ms Salas escaped in a lifeboat. She said: “There was wind and it was very cold, and we were wet because of the waves.”

They were expected to spend the weekend in corrugated-iron cabins at the Chilean Eduardo Frei Montalva airforce base and the neighbouring Professor Julio Escudero Research Station. The 91 passengers had begun their “adventure travel experience” from Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina. Fourteen had booked a Spirit of Shackleton tour through the British travel company Explore; the remainder were customers of the Canadian company GAP Adventures. The 2,398-tonne Explorer, the “little red ship” famed as the first cruise ship designed for the fledgeling Antarctic tourist industry, was built in 1969 in a Finnish shipyard by the pioneering tour operator Lars-Eric Lindblad. Equipped with an ice-resistant double hull, she was the first passenger ship to travel unescorted through the Northwest Passage and was billed by GAP Adventures as “the go-anywhere ship for the go-anywhere traveller”. The Explorer had headed south for the Antarctic Peninsula to explore the Southern Shetland Islands and cruise through fields of floating ice.

Graham Hockley, of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, said: “The ship is relatively small compared with the potential size of an iceberg. The top of the iceberg may be 50 metres away but it may have a second false summit under the water. If the ship strikes a point on the iceberg at a right angle, the force can be concentrated into a small area and puncture the hull.”

The Explorer’s search and rescue co-operation plans were held by British coastguards at Falmouth. At 5.30am the nightwatch officer in Cornwall received a phone call from coastguards in Norfolk, Virginia. A large Norwegian cruise liner, the Nordnorge, was deemed the most suitable to go to the cruise ship’s aid. Captain Arnvid Hanson said that it took five hours to reach the stricken cruiser, by which time she was listing at 23 to 25 degrees. He said that all the passengers were fit and well.

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