Cape Horn

1976

    Although I wore gloves, my hands turned blue when I bailed.  There was no doubt the hull was cracked:  I had gone over the side during a lull a few weeks and several thousand miles earlier and located the hairline running up the trailing edge of the keel.

    Even while sleeping I wore long underwear, wool pants, four shirts, two pairs of socks, a watch cap, and still I was cold.  When I first got up in the morning, my fingers were swollen twice their normal size, the skin drum taut,  like sausages.  It was December 1975.  Summertime in the Southern Ocean.  The sun was about as far south as it would ever get.  The temperature of both air and water were just above freezing, about as warm as they would ever get.  For the third successive day there was sleet and snow.  Somehow I had not thought to bring a shovel, so I was grateful when waves washed the snow from the cockpit.

    I was not complaining.  I was precisely where I wanted to be.  Through years and women and waves and wanton storms that raged without and within, I had kept coming at Cape Horn.  And at last, on my third attempt, it was very near.  How near I did not know because I had not had a sextant sight for several days, but near.  A few hundred miles ahead.

    The sea was a symphony of violence.  Each day the barometer moved at least half an inch.  Crests were blown from twenty-foot waves; spindrift was everywhere.  Never before had the sea seemed so alive.  That it isn’t was brought home to me by one of the great wandering albatross, that, in those big waves, I often saw gliding in troughs below me.  This one soared beside EGREGIOUS for several seconds and then turned his head and looked at me deliberately.  Eye held eye.  Life acknowledged life.

    One morning I was on the foredeck lowering the staysail, when I happened to glance down just as a wave passed.  While in fact it was moving forward and EGREGIOUS was sliding down its back, the momentary sensation was that the boat was going forward, about to take a two-story drop.  It was a long way down.

    Every once in a while a set of bigger waves, perhaps twenty to thirty feet, went through.

    I was standing in the companionway, having just lifted a bucket full of ice water from the bilge, when I saw a line of immense curling crests speeding toward me.  In retrospect I should have closed the hatch, but I was mesmerized.  The crest of the last giant toppled ten yards to windward, and I thought we would be inundated; but EGREGIOUS, despite her imperfections, had many virtues, and she turned her hip and rose gracefully through seething form.

    After fifty days and six thousand miles of sailing south, our course was now east.  My later advice to anyone wanting to sail from California to Cape Horn was simple:  sail south until the rigging freezes over and turn left.  We had made that turn.  Odd that a compass course could bring such joy.

    I let my mind race ahead.  East to the Horn.  East, east, east, with the soaring albatrosses and the petrels and the shearwaters and prions.  East fleeing before the shrieking gales, running with the foaming waves.  East across the South Atlantic across the Southern Ocean.  East past Africa.  Past Australia, past Tasmania and the Tasman Sea.  East with the hissing, driving spray.  East toward the rising sun.  East, east, east past New Zealand.  East halfway across the Pacific.  East for twelve thousand miles.  East for days and weeks and months.  East until finally at long last we could turn north and leave the Forties behind and perhaps be warm again.  That was the plan; but I knew it would not happen that way.  Somewhere I would have to put in to repair the hull.  I did not care.  We would have already rounded Cape Horn.

    Back in California I knew that some people were thinking about me, wondering where I was at that moment, what I was doing.  If they guessed either bailing or re-stitching the mainsail, they would have a 90% probability of being right.  The sails were top quality, but they were not heavy enough, particularly the main.  For this the sailmaker was not entirely to blame.  No one had ever before sailed alone from California for Cape Horn, so no one really knew how strong the sails must be.  I spent a lot of time sewing.  The mainsail had to be lowered and dragged into the cabin three of the first five days south of 50°S.  And when the wind went east for a few hours, I did not drive EGREGIOUS hard to windward to save both the hull and the sails.

    The wind was less constant than I expected, blowing fifteen, then thirty, fifteen, then thirty, making it difficult to adjust the Aries steering vane, and causing EGREGIOUS to yaw between a heading of 90° and 160°.  The only constants were that every day became colder and every day passed without my being able to get a sun sight.  The two were related.  Without sights to fix our position, the safest course was to go further south, which made it colder.

    On December 11, I decided that we must be south of the Horn, and set the steering vane to a course that I hoped would average due east.  My dead reckoning put us on the latitude of the Diego Ramirez Islands, some fifty miles southwest of the cape.  If I saw them and conditions were favorable, I would close Horn Island.  If not, I would pass it unseen.

    Each morning, with only rare exceptions imposed by the weather, I baked biscuits.  Usually I just dropped lumps of dough on the pan—after all they tasted as good no matter what the shape—but perhaps partly to demonstrate to myself that I could still impose order on chaos, I decided to make proper biscuit-shaped biscuits that morning.  I dug out the cookie cutter and carefully formed six perfect biscuits.  However, no sooner had I put them in to bake, when I realized that something extraordinary was occurring outside:  the sun was casting shadows.

    Without taking the time for foul-weather gear, I grabbed the stopwatch and sextant and dashed on deck, climbing to the stern where I could sometimes see the sun from behind the mainsail and through the clouds.  But EGREGIOUS was rolling so much, the horizon so broken by leaping waves, the sun so dim, that I could no manage a useful sight.

    After fifteen minutes of futile effort, I smelled something burning.  As I started forward, a freezing wave broke over me.

    I rescued the biscuits and set them on the galley counter, while I dried myself and the sextant.  Before I finished, another wave struck EGREGIOUS abeam, and all but one of the biscuits fell into the bilge.

    At noon the day improved sufficiently so that I was able to get my first good sun sights for five days.  Unless I was making some serious error in calculation, the Diego Ramirez Islands were not far ahead.

    I spent most of the afternoon bundled in many layers of clothes and foul-weather gear, sitting in the companionway, staring ahead.  The sun disappeared behind thickening clouds, and at intervals sleet drove me below deck.  At 4:46 p.m. I had just heated some spaghetti and returned to sit in the companionway to eat, when I looked up and saw land.  The first land since Guadalupe Island two days out of San Diego.  For weeks I had sailed across the great bands of weather:  the northeast trades, the doldrums, the southeast trades, the horse latitudes, the Roaring Forties; I had marked little x’s on charts; I had told myself that I was nearing Cape Horn; but I had dreamed and struggled for so long that it did not seem real until I saw those desolate rocks ahead.  Now, even if the mast came down, EGREGIOUS would be blown past the Horn.

    A little more than two hours later the cutter passed south of the southernmost of the Diego Ramirez Islands.  The wind was only twenty-five knots, but the surf against the green-gray cliffs was impressive.  Cape Horn tomorrow, I kept telling myself.  I could hardly believe it.  But it was true.

    That night the Horn lived up to its reputation.  The wind increased quickly to a gale.  By dawn it was blowing fifty knots, and during the day it built to a full Force 12.  Long before it reached that strength, the mainsail ripped.  I manhandled it into the cabin and re-stitched the torn seam, but I didn’t attempt the by then impossible task of resetting the sail.

    The waves increased again to twenty to thirty feet now that EGREGIOUS was sailing over the shallow continental shelf, and there were two sets, one coming from the southwest, driven before the gale; the other from the northwest rebounding from the land.  Both sets of waves were breaking.

    For the first time, and one of only a handful ever, I tied myself in the cockpit to steer.

    Averaging eight knots under bare poles, EGREGIOUS rolled from beam to beam, sometimes in those cross-seas rolling to port, sometimes to starboard.  Even though it was not in operation, the servo-rudder for the Aries remained in the water, and as EGREGIOUS surfed down some of the larger waves, a rooster tail rose from it, as from a hydroplane.  The strain on the tiller was immense, often forcing me to brace myself with my legs and use both arms to drag the cutter back on course.  There was no time to turn to see on which quarter the next dangerous wave loomed, but after a while I knew by feel and sound.  And though I caught only glimpses of them as they swooped across my field of vision, even in the strongest winds albatrosses and petrels soared about as usual.

    Through what was a very long day, I steered.  Finally, at 7:00 p.m. the wind decreased to thirty knots, and I was able to engage the Aries.  Stiff and cold and tired and hungry, I stumbled into the cabin.

    After cooking a victory banquet of canned stew, I put a Bach fugue on the cassette player.  Bach’s music was a small but triumphant sound there at 57°S.

    I knew that I had just become the first American to round Cape Horn alone; but even if I had not been the first, the struggle would have been worthwhile and the day should have been as hard as it was.  A smashed hand, frostbite, piercing cold, fatigue were all made endurable.  The water I bailed into the Atlantic that morning had come from the Pacific the night before. Cape Horn, which a year earlier had seemed so impossibly remote, was behind me.

(The original version of this appeared in STORM PASSAGE, which is no longer in print but can be obtained through Amazon.  It is also included in A SINGLE WAVE available from Sheridan House.)