SAILING THE COAST OF THE LAST CONTINENT

DECEPTION Island, off the northern tip of Antarctica, must count as one of the planet’s most freakish places. The hulls of 1900s whaling boats rest in the black sand while big blubber boilers fade on the beach like props in a steampunk dream. It’s a doughnut of land, a flooded caldera with a bay in the center where the active volcano there once heated the water high enough to strip the paint off ships.

A trip to this part of the Antarctic Peninsula—an 800-mile-long pinkie ringed with crabeater seals, chinstrap penguins, and colossal ice—is all about the boat, and ours was exceptional. The SV

Australis was a 75-foot yacht with just 11 souls aboard, and Deception was one of the first stops on a 17-day journey. While using the ship, operated by outfitter Natural Habitat Adventures, as our floating home base, we paddled around icebergs glowing an alien green in Paradise Harbor. We took Zodiacs to rocky beaches for snoozes in the sun. With no real schedule to keep, we’d cut the engines to listen to minke whales chuffing through the channel and camped for a night on a dollop of ice no bigger than a rink.

In the end, though, simply being onboard proved the most memorable. Many afternoons I’d climb into the crow’s nest to watch the ice slide around the bow or hang out on the bridge as hourglass dolphins played to starboard. Come evenings, we’d sit around a large table in the stern and eat lasagna and fish prepared by a French chef. Back home, I could hardly talk about it without getting choked up. Such is the power of Antarctica.