Rescued cruise ship passengers leave Antarctica

Vessel carrying more than 150 hit ice and sank

Chilean Air Force personnel helped passengers of the Explorer as they arrived on lifeboats at King George Island, Antarctica. (Chilean Navy via Reuters)

BUENOS AIRES - Nearly 40 hours after abandoning a sinking cruise ship near Antarctica, the passengers of the MS Explorer were flown to Chile last night to begin their journeys home.

Poor wind conditions had delayed their flights aboard military aircraft, but a plane carrying 80 of the passengers arrived in the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas. A second flight with the remaining passengers was expected to follow.

While they waited for their flights, some of the 154 passengers and crew members were able to briefly use satellite telephones, providing vivid accounts of a adventure vacation that none of them is likely to forget.

"Well, he didn't sound very good, actually," Mandy Flood, of the Scilly Isles in Britain, said after speaking to her husband, Bob, a bird-watching guide who was aboard the Explorer. "Obviously, the rescue boats took quite a while to get to them, so they were all pretty cold and exhausted."

The trouble started at the end of the 12th day of a 19-day cruise. Some of the passengers were sleeping in their cabins and others were having drinks as the ship neared the South Shetland Islands. About 11:30 p.m., Captain Bengt Wiman said he felt a buckle that did not feel quite right.

"At first I thought that we had collided with a whale," said Wiman, who spoke yesterday via satellite phone with media in his home country of Sweden.

But a short time later, a crew member informed him that water was entering the ship. The crew quickly found the leak, a hole made by submerged ice, he said.

Andrea Salas, an Argentine crew member, said she was in the bar with colleagues and passengers when someone came in and yelled, "There's water!" After being briefed by Wiman, the passengers noticed that the ship began to list toward its starboard side as water filled the decks below.

Passenger Eli Charne, 38, of California, told Reuters that that he initially feared the worst.

"I thought the ship was going down," Charne recalled of the moments after he felt the vessel hit the ice. "We were on the lowest deck of the ship, so we rushed out of the room and pressed the emergency button as water rushed in."

The electricity eventually cut out, and the passengers boarded lifeboats and rafts around 3 a.m. The passengers were reassured that help was on the way, and few showed worry.

"We were surprised because it was peaceful and a behavior that was very good among passengers, who didn't panic and who were very controlled the whole time," Salas told the Buenos Aires newspaper, Clarin.

But some of the passengers grew cold and weary after spending hours in rafts and lifeboats until being rescued by the Nordnorge, a Norwegian cruise liner.

Officials said six passengers were treated for mild hypothermia, the Chilean newspaper La Tercera reported yesterday.

A spokesman for GAP Adventures, which owned the Explorer, said that upon landing in Punta Arenas, a city at the southern tip of mainland Chile, the passengers would be given the option of joining another cruise or flying home.

The company reported that the passenger list included 24 British nationals, 17 Dutch, 14 Americans, 12 Canadians, 10 Australians, four Swiss, four Irish, three Danes, and two Argentines.