Passengers escape unhurt from Antarctic ship

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - More than 150 passengers and crew escaped unhurt after their cruise ship hit ice in the Antarctic and started sinking on Friday, the ship's owner and coast guard officials said.

A Norwegian passenger boat in the area safely picked up all the occupants of the Explorer from the lifeboats they used to flee the ship when it ran into problems off King George Island in Antarctica at 12:24 a.m. EST, the Explorer's owners said.

A spokesman for G.A.P Adventures, the Canadian travel company that owns the vessel, said 154 passengers and crew had been on board the ship. He had told Reuters earlier the number was 100.

"We were passing through ice as usual ... we do that every day ... But this time something hit the hold and we got a little leakage downstairs," the Explorer's first officer Peter Svensson told Reuters Television by satellite phone from the Norwegian ship, the Nordnorge.

He said the rescue had gone smoothly. "No one was hysterical, they were just sitting there nice and quiet, because we knew there were ships coming."

The passengers and crew were being taken to Chile's Eduardo Frei base in the Antarctic from where they would later be flown to Punta Arenas in southern Chile, a Chilean navy commander told local television.

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The stricken vessel had set sail from the southern Argentine port of Ushuaia last week and was heading south toward the barren, icy continent, officials said.

Pictures taken from Chilean navy helicopters showed the vessel listing severely in dark gray waters. At least 10 lifeboats and rafts could be seen.

A company statement said the passengers included Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, Dutch, Japanese, Argentines and other nationalities, and that the families of those on board were being contacted.

G.A.P Adventures spokeswoman Susan Hayes told CNN the vessel "didn't hit an iceberg, it hit some ice ... There are ice floes, but it didn't hit a huge iceberg."

Hours after the vessel's evacuation, Chilean government spokesman Ricardo Lagos Weber told reporters: "The information we have at the moment is that the boat's sinking due to the hole in its hull, and what the icebreaker Viel is going to do is see if there'll be any pollution as a result of the sinking."

The Explorer usually makes two-week cruises around the Antarctic, costing some 4,000 pounds ($8,000) per cabin.

Smaller than most cruise ships, it is able to enter narrower bays off the continent and scientists are on board to brief passengers on the region's geology and climate change, the spokesman added.

King George Island lies about 700 miles south of Cape Horn, the tip of South America, and is the largest of the South Shetland islands.

Cruise trip travel has grown in Antarctica in recent years and Pedro Tuhay, of the Argentine coast guard, told local radio that 52 cruises were expected at the southern port of Ushuaia during this year's peak season from October to April.

(Additional reporting by Peter Graff, Luke Baker and David Clarke and Reuters Television in Britain, Rodrigo Martinez in Chile and Jonathan Spicer in Canada)

(Writing by Helen Popper, editing by Vicki Allen)