Originally Posted by
chgoeditor
Thanks for the feedback! You described the ship Multanovsky as a smaller ship. How many passengers? I found conflicting pieces of info re. whether the Ioffe holds 86 or 110 passengers.
Looking at the deck plans, our Multanovsky had 29 cabins. The expedition staff needs cabins as well so it was about ~50 passengers.
Ioffe has 59 cabins so it's actually bigger and would hold ~100 passengers. Perhaps it's 86 + staff, or 110 w/o staff.
I was very pleased with the number of passengers on our ship, makes all the zodiac loadings and landings pretty fast. I would definetly not want to go on a Antarctica cruise that is bigger than Ioffe's ~100 passengers.
Alas, if the choice is between going to Antarctica and checking email a couple times, or not going to Antarctica, I'm going to Antarctica. I'm self-employed, and disappearing from my client's radar screen for two weeks (even with their knowledge & advance warning) could kill my business. In this economy, I have no choice, so unfortunately it might limit my ship selection.
You might want to check renting an Iridium or Inmarsat terminal and connect it to your laptop. Iridium is pretty slow for data so Inmarsat might be the best option, a quick looks gives terminals from $40/week and 25 Mbytes of data costs about $170. It's not cheap on the ships offering internet access either.