It’s December, and passengers are standing in the bridge of the 138-passenger National Geographic Resolution looking over the bow at the Drake Passage. Sailors’ nemesis, social media phenomenon, this notoriously tumultuous 500-mile stretch of open Atlantic between the Antarctic’s South Shetland Islands and southern Chile’s Cape Horn saw an estimated 120,000 tourists during the 2025–2026 winter season alone. That’s compared to the 57 passengers who sailed on the world’s inaugural Antarctic tourism expedition, 60 years ago this season.
In the past 10 years, tourism in this polar region has grown fast—as has the Drake’s reputation.
The captain and crew attend to high-tech stations and navigation screens in this vast, bright space on Deck 7. The ship crests and then plummets between swells and onlooking passengers grab onto railings and immobile objects to steady themselves as they behold tens of thousands of gallons of bright blue seawater sloshing onto the lower decks.
On the way south 10 days prior, this ship was treated to the Drake Lake—rolling swells so long and low, the 408-foot-long vessel barely clocked them.
It was “literally as calm as it gets,” recalls Martin Graser, captain of the National Geographic Resolution. He has crossed the Drake more than 200 times. He’s also plenty familiar with the Drake Shake, driven by high winds and fierce currents that swirl uninterrupted around the bottom of the globe, whipping the sea into a frenzy. Now, he’s barreling right into it.
Drake pioneers
A ship of Dutch navigators made the first recorded crossing of the Drake Passage in 1616. A ship of tourists made this same gamble in 1966, when Swedish American explorer Lars-Eric Lindblad chartered a rudimentary Argentine navy vessel and guided a group of paying guests to the Antarctic Peninsula.
Then, in 1991, governments signed the Antarctic Treaty’s environmental protocol, and seven tour operators together founded the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO), laying down a set of protocol-inspired rules—like wildlife distances and landing limits (how many people can go ashore at one time, where they can visit, and what ships have clearance for passengers to go ashore). These rules set the foundation for a tourism industry to officially take root in Antarctica.
Today, Antarctic tourism is booming. In the age of the coldcation and a desire to reach more remote locales, visits to the White Continent have nearly tripled within the past decade. Early sailors—and even early tourists—could never have imagined the luxury and stability of today’s Antarctic “expeditions.”
While some travelers may choose to cast back to the past and cross the Drake on a historic wooden schooner or even a sailboat, most set sail from the Chilean archipelago Tierra del Fuego aboard modern icebreakers.
The reward for successfully crossing the Drake Passage is scenes like this at the Yalour Islands in Antarctica.
Photo by Michael S. Nolan
Aboard ships like the Resolution, tables lashed to the floors are covered with nonskid material that keeps wineglasses and dinner plates in place, and when the seas are too rough for sit-down dining, there are other comforts on offer: This evening, candy bowls on bars and countertops brim with little white paper packets of meclizine—drowsiness-inducing antihistamine pills for seasickness prevention.
Graser pulls the wind and wave forecast up on the screens in the lounge. Digital blooms of red and purple sweep across the displays: It’s going to be a rough night. Some passengers have been, perhaps naïvely, even rooting for this. Will they regret it?
Algorithmic allure
Those who’ve never experienced the Drake Shake in person may still be able to imagine it, thanks to viral TikTok and Instagram videos of swells dwarfing the hulls of massive vessels as if they were bathtub toys. The horror-movie version of social media’s sea shanty craze, Drake Shake videos have racked up tens of millions of views.
Influencer and traveler-by-trade Alyssa Ramos, who has made eight Drake crossings since 2017, has a theory as to what’s driving the allure. “I’ve spent a lot of time observing what makes people respond,” she says, “and it’s usually something triggering, or dangerous. I can post the most beautiful content and the [posts] that go viral are when I’m in danger and it shows. The Drake Passage delivers that.” Her Instagram video of friends sliding down a tilting deck, wineglasses in hand, racked up 15 million views.
“It’s as wild as it looks,” she adds of the Drake. Ramos has made some rough passages, and she dreads the possibility of the Shake every time she returns. “You can’t turn it off. You have to be mentally strong and just willing to endure it for up to two and a half days.”
Engineering a smoother sailing
A passenger on the December Resolution voyage, Victoria Photos, who is traveling with her sister Ilene, describes her first trip to Antarctica in the early 1990s, on the MS Society Explorer. This was a ship Lindblad originally commissioned in 1969, and it stayed in service operating polar expedition cruises for 38 years—until striking an iceberg and sinking in the Antarctic in 2007. (All passengers and crew were rescued.)
Victoria’s trip was memorable even without such an ending. She recalls how she and other passengers were thrown to their hands and knees, crawling to traverse the ship, becoming violently ill with seasickness. She even recalls experiencing PTSD upon seeing videos of the Drake Passage years later.
But as shipbuilding, navigation and forecasting technology, and industry personnels’ experience have all evolved or improved with time, Photos decided to go back—again and again. After her first, terrible experience with the Drake Shake, she has traveled to Antarctica four subsequent times. “It’s like having a baby,” she says of crossing the Drake, over breakfast with her sister in the Resolution’s dining room as the white-capped swells outside the windows continue to grow larger: One tends to forget how agonizing the way there can be, overshadowed by the experience of the destination.
The Resolution’s Graser estimates that in his 25 years on expedition ships, he has been greeted by a calm Drake Lake about a third of the time. Half the time, waves may be three to six meters high—the height of a two-story building. The remainder: Well, sometimes you end up in the thick of it, he says.
“People are terrified of crossing the Drake,” says Graser, “but there is always a way to do it well.”
The keys are being flexible with travel timing and a ship design that includes state-of-the-art fins or rotor systems mounted under the hull to reduce the roll of the ship. The latest innovations in stabilization—something earlier ships like the Explorer lacked—even work while a vessel is stationary or at anchor.
“Zero-speed stabilizers prevent the horrible roll of the ship while we’re out in the Drake,” he says. Additionally, ships built by operators that include National Geographic–Lindblad, Aurora, Polar Latitudes, and Quark Expeditions sport a next-generation bow design called the X-BOW, first launched in 2019, which looks like the head of an orca whale in profile. Swells flow up and over the foreship instead of slamming into it, which cuts way back on impact and spray, making rough crossings smoother.
The timing and route also matter. If the forecast is bad, Graser says, a ship could delay and leave later, or try to cross earlier. Savvy navigators will also minimize their time over the continental shelf—the raised seafloor around a continent before it drops away into deep ocean—where swells shoal into shorter, steeper, more forceful waves.
The allure of Antarctica includes spotting gentoo penguin colonies on Cuverville Island.
Photo by Ralph Lee Hopkins/Courtesy of National Geographic-Lindblad
For those who want to see Antarctica but can’t stomach the possibility of tempestuous seas, Graser notes that there is the option to book a charter flight. These depart from Punta Arenas, Chile, and land at an airstrip in Antarctica, where passengers may join a ship and cruise the peninsula. Some luxury-expedition lines, such as Silversea, also offer a fly-cruise package. Other options involve flying out of southern Chile or South Africa for entirely land-based experiences on the White Continent. These land-only options can range from a day trip with Chilean company DAP for approximately $7,000 to a luxury week-long camp with White Desert, which can run between $45,000 and $115,000.
But for Graser, a longtime captain who grew up sailing the Baltic Sea on boats his dad made by hand, the idea of a fly-over feels somehow incomplete.
Valerie Joy Wilson, a travel influencer and travel advisor who has made six passages, says she’s heard people joke that flying over the Drake is considered “‘cheating’—because you miss such an iconic part of the expedition,” she says. Of course, she adds, fly cruises are a solid option for travelers short on time or concerned about seasickness. But still, crossing the Drake “feels like earning your stripes.”
Battening down the hatches
On Graser’s mid-December Resolution trip, he navigates the Drake Shake for a single night. After crew let guests know about the foreboding forecast and battening down the hatches, stowed objects still clink within drawers. Cabinet doors flap. Passengers, including Dr. Allie Lekson, an emergency medicine specialist from Wichita, and her fiancé Kaleb Waggoner leave the bridge, grip the handrails, and shuffle back to their cabin. Lekson is prone to seasickness. She wasn’t one of the passengers rooting for the shake. In fact, she’s been dreading this moment.
But she and Waggoner find themselves being rocked to sleep—at least until being jolted back awake by a rogue wave, which brings a cacophony of aluminum water bottles and other items flying through the air and striking the far wall, then rolling around on the floor. Even with the world’s most cutting-edge engineering, the Drake continues to deliver its signature sense of adventure.
Before long, the sounds turn to white noise and blend into the background. “It was essentially like being in a cradle and gently rocked to sleep.” She feels they got lucky with “a rather tame experience”—no crawling on their hands and knees. No seasickness. It could have been worse. But she’d take the gamble, she says. “I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
