Day 84 - Round The Horn

Normally I sleep until 2 AM when it is time to prepare for the weather fax. This night I set the timer for 90 minutes so that I could check our position vs Diego Ramirez just after midnight. I had made a subtle adjustment to Jeff and yes, we would clear the island comfortably. Then on the chart plotter I saw the grey symbol of an AIS target It was the Lovina, a tanker, headed for Rio and 50 minutes away. He was a big brute, with length of 797 ft and beam of 140 ft, making 13.4 knots on course 091T. The chart plotter was constantly calculating the intercepts of our two vessels, which was continually changing as Pachuca varied her speed and heading from moment to moment as she yawed and pitched while dealing with the waves. The estimated closest point between us varied from 2 miles down to a few hundred feet. There were two ways to deal with this: make a subtle course change or keep an eye out for the ship. A ship passing a half mile away does not look nearly as scary in actual sight than it does on the chart plotter screen. Soon the "Dangerous Target" alarm started going off whenever the chart plotter calculated that the tanker would penetrate my 2 mile diameter safety ring within 24 minutes. This was good, because it would have woken me up.

I elected to suit up and go topside to sight the vessel and take manual control of the wheel if it was required. I turned on my VHF radio for possible emergency communication. From the cockpit I was amazed at how close the tanker was. We were on an almost parallel course which was not surprising, given that we were both trying to round the Horn. I hailed him on the VHF radio: "Tanker Lovina, Tanker Lovina, do you copy?" I got an immediate calm and polite response from a gentleman with a Spanish accent. "Good morning. I am a small sail boat off your starboard side. Do you see me? Over." His response was "Yes, I have you on my starboard side." "Thank you sir, have a good day." He wished me a good day too and the conversation was over. I could see that the tanker would cross my bow so I altered Jeff to take me 5 degrees to starboard. This opened the intercept to a steady 1 mile or so. Lovina was doing 13.4 knots to my 4.5 so even though we appeared to be running neck and neck only a half mile apart I knew that she would cross my path well ahead of me. Even though I had gone to bed at dusk 90 minutes earlier it was now a beautiful dawn in a partly cloudy sky and I'm sure that between Pachuca's tricolor at the top of her gyrating mast and her red trysail the Lovina would have had no trouble in seeing us. That was the first sign of human activity that I had seen in weeks.

For me the "night" was over. I put the kettle on for coffee to prepare for the coming day. We were well on the continental shelf with Diego Ramirez 20 miles off the starboard bow and the Horn 65 miles ahead. We had a fair wind of 20 knots and were moving well. I was confident that we would round the Horn in good daylight.

I tried to download a weather fax at 2.30 AM but it was a hopeless cause. The image was just a mass of random black and white pixels. I'll give up on weather faxes out of Australia for a while will try station PWZ-33 out of Rio. It provides surface analysis for the SW Atlantic Ocean.

The area had plenty of sea birds both in quantity and variety. This was not a surprise given the relatively shallow waters, proximity to land, and the nutrient-rich waters rushing by. The wave pattern was different too. The waves seemed shorter and faster, no doubt due to the relatively shallow water.

At 10 AM I went out for a look and saw land. I probably could have seen two hours earlier had I bothered to look. My part of the sky was relatively clear but to the north and east, over land, it was cloudy and misty. Seeing the mountains was a spooky sight after the solitude of the open ocean. I was headed slightly to the north of the Cape so an hour later, after putting a pan of bread dough in the oven, I gybed 23 miles from the Cape. After the gybe I took bearings to confirm what I thought I was seeing. Exactly to the north was the False Cape. Then sweeping to the right were the Hermite, Grevy, and Wolloston Island groups. At bearing 040T was a mountain that from the Google satellite photo I was fairly sure was on Wolloston Island. And to the right I was fairly sure that I was looking at Cape Horn. The bearing of 073T conformed to what the chart indicated. From my vantage it looked cone or dome shaped.

At noon our position was 56S07, 067W52, giving us a n-n distance of 103 miles in the direction 079T. We were 22 miles WSW of the Horn and at the SE course we were making we were approximately 23 miles from the meridian of the HORN, which would mark the official rounding.

After 2 hours I could see that the wind was subtly but steadily veering, so I gybed back and I could now just lay the Horn. Unless there was a wind shift I expected to get within 5 miles of the Horn before gybing back. To the NE of the Horn were some tiny islands which made the present course untenable even if I could just get by the Horn.

As we closed in on the Horn I went on deck and hoisted the Australian flag with the Fremantle Sailing Club Burgee underneath it. I was tempted to also hoist the autographed SCAMP pennant that Simeon Baldwin of Port Townsend had entrusted to me but I didn't want to risk losing it in the wind. Simeon can know that the pennant went around the Horn nice and cosy in a Ziploc bag. I had also planned to hoist Victor's storm jib for the rounding but without a functioning inner forestay that was not possible. Nevertheless Victor can know that his boat Chiquita's storm jib has been round the Horn.

When we were just within 10 miles of the Horn I managed to get a reasonable video of the flags with the Horn dead ahead. From the angle that I was approaching the Horn its profile was the classical one depicted in most photos, with a gentle slope on the left getting steeper to match the angle of the right side. However, the sea was becoming so rough that I gybed soon after to head for deeper water. At this point I had yet to cross the meridian of the Horn but that would come soon. Within an hour of the gybe the sea became noticeably calmer.

On 19 January 2012 at time 00:10:12 UTC/GMT the sailing vessel Pachuca crossed the meridian of Cape Horn and formally made the rounding of the Horn. I celebrated with a half bottle of French champagne (Piper-Heidsieck brut) that Jean Davies of Port Townsend had provided for the occasion. (Thanks Jean, superb champagne!) I drank toasts to Jean and her Blackberry the Cat, then to everybody who has followed this adventure.

There is plenty of time for me to reflect on this event in more measured words than I am capable of now. However, I will utter the two words that best describe my feelings at the moment: gratitude and thanks. I am grateful to life for allowing me this opportunity and for actually allowing me succeed. And I give my thanks to all who have followed this adventure and have given their support, often with very practical advice.

I don't claim to understand the psychic and spiritual realms, even though I know that they are there and very real. Having said that, I will say that wasn't alone in this. I had company and I had help.

Enough said for now.

Love Ya All, Folks.

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