Roberto Pandiani (BRA) and Duncan Ross (RSA), are the first sailors in the world to cross the Drake Passage on an open boat without cabin.
It took them 83 hours to cross the famous and fearsome Drake Passage - the infamous 500 miles of open ocean that separates Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula known as the roughest ocean in the world - but at 01h30am the sailors achieved the primary objective and the biggest challenge of the expedition.
Satellite, the 21' open catamaran built in Kevlar, sailed day and night in various conditions. Days with awesome blue skies, very dark nights, winds from 4 to 30 knots, outside temperatures from 12°C to 4°C. Not to mention the water temperatures dropping to 0 or 2°C after they crossed the Antarctic Convergence, an area where the colder, Southern Ocean that surrounds the Antarctic continent meets the warmer waters of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans.
Satellite and Kotic II, the 62' support vessel, are heading now to Deception Island, an active volcano in the northern peninsula of Antarctica, part of the South Shetland chain, on Bransfield Strait, at latitude 63 S. A geothermal spring within the crater permits the novelty of bathing in a generally freezing sea.
From Deception Island, Beto and Duncan will then follow the 300 miles coast from the Peninsula to the Antarctic Polar Circle.