National Geographic Resolution

National Geographic Resolution is the second of Lindblad’s two purpose-built polar ships and, on paper, the identical twin of National Geographic Endurance: the same Ulstein CX104 design, the same hull begun at CRIST in Gdynia and finished at Ulstein Verft, the same Polar Class 5 Category A certification, the same 408 feet on a 69-foot beam, the same 138 guests. The X-BOW works the same way on both, the hull pierces a swell rather than climbing it, so the pitching impact that defines a Drake crossing on a conventional bow is mostly absent. That story is told on her sister’s page and it is the same story here.

What separates them is the calendar.

The half of the year she is not in the ice

Endurance is a two-hemisphere polar ship: Antarctica in the austral summer, Svalbard and Greenland in the boreal one. Resolution only does the first half of that. Her Antarctic season out of Ushuaia is the largest single block of her schedule (the Peninsula, the Circle, and the long Falklands and South Georgia crossings), but when the ice season ends she goes west and north into water that has nothing to do with her ice belt.

On the sailings listed here that means Osaka and coastal Japan, Papeete and the Society and Tuamotu islands, and a smaller Arctic block out of Reykjavík. The Pacific voyages are the interesting ones. Lindblad has been putting her back into Oceania after several years away, with a long Easter Island to Tahiti passage and an eleven-day run through the Societies and the Tuamotus, and the route between Easter Island and the Pitcairn group is not something a lightly-built ship attempts casually. That is where the fuel and water capacity built into the class pays off in a place with no ice in it at all: she can stay away from a port for a long time.

The trade is that a hull optimized for the Southern Ocean is heavier, deeper and more expensive to run than anything you would design for the tropics. She carries an ice belt to Papeete and never uses it. That is the price of a two-ship polar fleet where one of the two has to earn its keep year-round.

Christened on the ice

She was delivered on 30 September 2021 and made her first voyage that November to Antarctica, South Georgia and the Falklands. Instead of a bottle against the bow at a pier, she was named on an ice sheet in the Weddell Sea by Captain Heidi Norling. The name is Cook’s, HMS Resolution, the ship of his second and third voyages, which crossed the Antarctic Circle in 1773 and got farther south than anyone had. Given how much of her working year is now spent in the Pacific islands Cook charted, the choice has aged better than most ship names do.

What is aboard

The layout follows the class. There is an expedition base with gear lockers, an observation lounge and a library, a main lounge with a full bar, and a bridge that is open to guests. Restaurant 270° takes the wrap-around windows forward, with two smaller rooms for lighter meals and small-group dinners. Wellness runs to an infinity-edge pool and a sauna with a window, and there are Zodiacs and kayaks aboard along with the rest of the expedition kit.

The staff is the part that does not show up in a specification. These voyages carry naturalists, an undersea specialist and a National Geographic photographer or expert, and the day is built around what they find rather than around a printed schedule.

Who she suits

Anyone who wants Antarctica done properly and would rather cross the Drake on a bow that does not slam, and anyone who wants a genuinely remote Pacific itinerary on a ship built to handle weather. Her trips here run from ten nights to twenty-four, with a median of fifteen; she is the long-voyage ship of the pair, and several of her sailings are two weeks of open ocean with very few port days in them.

She does not suit anyone who wants to be entertained. A hundred and thirty-eight guests fills a small ship and, in Antarctica, means landings run in shifts under the hundred-ashore limit. And if you are choosing between the sisters purely on the ship, do not: they are the same vessel. Choose on where she is going.