Originally Posted by ojala

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.



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.