Rescued passengers head home

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Nearly 40 hours after abandoning a sinking cruise ship in icy waters near Antarctica, the passengers of the M/S Explorer were flown to Chile on Saturday 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 Chile city of Punta Arenas at 7:30 p.m. A second flight with the remaining passengers was expected to arrive later in the evening.

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

“Well, he didn’t sound very good, actually,” Mandy Flood, of the Isles of Scilly, said after speaking to her husband, Bob, a bird-watching guide who was aboard the Explorer. “Obviously, the rescue boats took quite awhile 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 snoozing in their cabins and others were sharing drinks at the bar as the ship neared the South Shetland Islands. About 11:30 p.m., Capt. 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 Saturday 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 slightly larger than a fist that was made by submerged ice, he said.

The electricity eventually cut out, and the passengers boarded lifeboats and rafts about 3 a.m. Few showed signs of worry, and some even cracked jokes about the Titanic, Flood said.

“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,” Andrea Salas, an Argentine crew member, said in a satellite telephone conversation, according to 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 Saturday.

A spokesman for G.A.P. Adventures, which owned the Explorer, said Saturday 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.