Lara Novak’s Antarctica: six weeks, from Ushuaia to the ice continent

Probably, if your dream is to take a cruise to Antarctica, you would contact his father Skip Novak, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on navigating the ice. But accompanying us on this journey of words, drawings, and photographs will be Lara Novak, Skip’s daughter, who at the age of eleven is starring in an adventure in the far south of the world, among the ice of Antarctica. Six weeks on a boat from Ushuaia to the Vernadsky weather station, during which he wrote a logbook that we publish, along with his photos and drawings. There is something special about this 11-year-old girl, when she was only two years old she traveled with her family for two months along the east coast of South America, from Brazil to Tierra del Fuego, and today through her eyes she takes us to sail with her from the extreme tip of Argentina, through the Beagle Channel to reach the Drake Passage and on to the ice of Antarctica. We will meet seals and penguins, icebergs preventing the Pelagic (Skip Dad’s 54-foot boat) from moving forward, famous shipowner Maria Cristina Rapisardi aboard her thirty-foot Royal Huisman Billy Budd, visit Port Lockroy and the Vernadsky weather station. “I started writing my own personal logbook”-Lara tells me-“because I felt that for many people what I was experiencing was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” I therefore leave the floor to your pages.
Find the full article in the February issue of The Journal of Sailing