“I am rather exhausted but very pleased that I got a message through. Strange that they can hear me clearly at Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands and I cannot hear them at all well. I cannot get a fifth of what they say. I understood British Antarctic Survey to say that there was no ice north of 67° south. I suppose this only applies to the neighbourhood of the Horn and not where I am now, but even so it is grand news.”
On March 17 I wrote in my log:
“If only the Horn would keep this up: smooth sea, delightful sailing, definitely bracing air, sun shining, and I don’t think I ever enjoyed a breakfast more than that one—grapefruit, potatoes fried in butter and eggs scrambled with a pinch of herbs, followed by two rounds of Gipsy Moth’s best wholemeal bread, with marmalade and butter. Coffee hot, and at the right end of the feast.”
It might seem Mediterranean weather, but this was still the Southern Ocean. I had a reminder of the need for constant vigilance about an hour after I wrote about that splendid breakfast, when I saw a blackhearted squall to windward in an otherwise bluish sky and blue sea. Fortunately, it did not hit me.
I felt an increasing impatience, and kept on plotting my track. This was a gentlemanly gait. I could have sailed faster by setting up a bigger jib, but that meant lugging it from the forecabin, through the cabin and heads (lavatory) to the cockpit, and back along the deck, because the forehatch was now bolted down with Alan Payne’s strongbacks. I did not relish this—and so far in that Southern Ocean there had always been a strong wind pretty soon after a spell of near calm or light airs in easterly weather. I decided to make do with the sails I had out.
For weeks now I had been having a private race with the sun to see whether I could round the Horn before the sun crossed the line going north. When I was still 442 miles from the Horn, the sun was 1° 21’ south of the line, that is, 81’, equivalent to 81 miles (sea miles) on earth, and moving north at 1’ (1 mile) an hour. I was sailing at 5½ miles an hour, and I reckoned that if I could keep up that pace I should win by about 3½ miles.
Albatrosses, magnificent, majestic birds, like everything I had imagined about albatrosses, and not like the smaller variety I had seen on the way to Australia, were always interesting. One particularly hugely-winged bird used to come for scraps from the yacht. I kept them for him and he would snap them up in a moment, and then keep circling the boat closely, as if asking for more. I felt that my vegetarian leavings must be a great disappointment to him. As I neared the Horn some whale birds, or prions, showed up. I had not seen any for ages. They are lovely creatures, and a thrill to watch, as graceful as swifts, and wheeling like swallows. Work went on. My log notes:
“I suppose I make a proper Charley of myself by mucking about with the mizzen staysail. It is only one better than a spinnaker for giving trouble, that sail. It does help enormously on some headings with speed, but sometimes seems bent on making a fool of me. I had a memorable tussle with it, going on for two hours, in my impatience to keep going now. First, I hoisted it, and it would not set, because the wind headed the boat as soon as the sail was up. So I hauled it down, bagged it, and dumped the bag in the afterhold. While I was doing this, my back bent on the job, there was a wind shift, and when I straightened up, the conditions were ideal—for what? A mizzen staysail! I felt a bit glum, then decided to have another go, hauled out the bag, and went all over the business again. The sail did some good for a bit, but the fluky wind made conditions very difficult for it. The self-steering gear just would not keep the boat anywhere near a fixed heading.”
At 22.25 that night (March 17) just before I turned in, I wrote the requiem to that day in the log:
“Back to Square One. I have been trying for 5 hours to control the boat with the mizzen staysail set, but could not succeed. It’s a matter of balance, I think; if she was all right for a 5-knot breeze she went off course up to 90° for a 12-knot one. Anyway, I have given up at last because I want some sleep, and have dropped the damn thing. Now we seem pretty steady on course. Good night.”
That night was memorable in another way as well—I slept out of my day clothes.
Next day, Saturday, March 18, I was as excited as a schoolboy at the end of term, waiting for the time to leave school. In spite of the fluky wind and all my troubles with the mizzen staysail, we had not had a bad run the day before, 163 miles, which left me some 302 miles to the old Ogre. I reckoned that I was only 100 miles from Noir Island, outside the Cockburn Channel, where Joshua Slocum had his big adventure with the Milky Way1 The Diego Ramirez Islands, which I was aiming at, were 249 miles ahead. I badly wanted a sunshot to check my position, but the sky was overcast, and there was not much chance of one, though I kept my sextant ready in the cockpit just in case. In the afternoon I tried to pick up Ushaia or Punta Arenas radio beacons, which seemed the only ones possible for me to use, but couldn’t. I tried again just after seven o’clock in the evening, and I did get a bearing of Punta Arenas, but I hoped that it was not right, because it put me in the western end of Magellan Strait! Another shot was worse, putting me east of the Horn! However, I had now found the frequency for the Punta Arenas beacon, which was quite different from that given in the Admiralty Manual, and I could have another go in the morning. My log for that day closes:
“I have set the off-course alarm to sound off if the heading changes 45 ° from 080 °. I had better try for as much sleep as possible tonight, because I don’t suppose I’ll get much tomorrow, with all those islands around.”
The Milky Way is the name given to a mass of rocks and rocky islets off Tierra del Fuego, north-west of Cape Horn. In March 1896, Joshua Slocum, making the first singlehanded voyage round the world in his sloop Spray, was driven back towards Cape Horn by a furious gale, after reaching the Pacific through the Magellan Strait. He spent an appalling night among the rocks and breakers of the Milky Way. Describing it in his book, Sailing Alone Round the World, he wrote, “This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escaped.” He added,“The great naturalist Darwin looked over this seascape from the deck of the Beagle, and wrote in his journal, ‘Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week.’ He might have added, ‘or seaman as well’.”
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14. Rounding Cape Horn
When I was researching in records and old logs in preparation for my voyage it was soon apparent that the seas around Cape Horn had a reputation unique among all the oceans of the world; more, they have had this reputation for as long as man has known them, ever since Drake deduced that there was the passage that bears his name between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands off Antarctica—Drake Strait.
Cape Horn is an island, or rather the tip of an island, a massive cliff some 1,400 feet high that stands where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet, at the southerly end of the South American continent. Why has it such an evil reputation? I tried to answer this question in my book Along the Clipper Way.
“The prevailing winds in the Forties and Fifties, between 40° S. and 60° S., are westerly and pretty fresh on the average. For instance, off the Horn there are gales of Force 8 or more on one day in four in the spring and one day in eight in the summer. Winds have a lazy nature in that they refuse to climb over a mountain range if they can sweep past the end of it. South America has one of the greatest mountain ranges of the world, the Andes, which blocks the westerlies along a front of 1,200 miles from 35° S. right down to Cape Horn. All this powerful wind is crowding through Drake’s Strait between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands, 500 miles to the south. The normal westerlies pouring through this gap are interfered with by the turbulent, vicious little cyclones rolling off the Andes. The same process occurs in reverse with the easterly winds which, though more rare than the westerlies, blow when a depression is passing north of the Horn.
“As for the waves, the prevailing westerlies set up a current flowing eastwards round the world at a mean rate of 10 to 20 miles per day. This current flows in all directions at times
due to the passing storms, but the result of all the different currents is this 10 to 20 miles per day flowing eastwards. As the easterly may check this current or even reverse it for a while, the prevailing stream flowing eastwards may sometimes amount to as much as 50 miles a day. As with the winds, this great ocean river is forced to pass between South America and the South Shetland Islands. This in itself tends to make the stream turbulent.
“But there is another factor which greatly increases the turbulence. The bottom of the ocean shelves between the Horn and the Shetland Islands and this induces the huge seas to break. It is like a sea breaking on the beach at Bournemouth in a gale, except that the waves, instead of being 4 feet high, are likely to be 60 feet high.
“There is yet another factor to make things worse. Anyone who has sailed out past the Needles from the Solent when the outgoing tide is opposing a Force 6 wind knows what a hateful short steep sea can result. A yacht will seem to be alternately standing on its stem and its stern with a lot of water coming inboard. The same thing happens at the Horn on a gigantic scale if there is an easterly gale blowing against the current flowing past the Horn.
“What size are these notorious waves? No one yet has measured them accurately in the Southern Ocean, but the oceanographers have been measuring waves in the North Atlantic for some years. The British Institute of Oceanography have invented a wave measuring instrument which they use at the weather ships stationed in the Atlantic. Recently one instrument with a 60-foot scale recorded a wave of which the trace went off the scale. This wave was estimated at 69 feet in height, higher than our five storey house in London. An American steamship in the South Pacific is said to have encountered a wave 112 feet high. Brian Grundy who used to sail with me in Gipsy Moth II told me that when he was in the Southern Ocean in a big whaling steamer he reckoned that one wave was 120 feet high. L. Draper of the Institute of Oceanography says that, according to Statistics of a Stationary Random Process, if a sea of average height 30 feet is running, then one wave out of every 300,000 can be expected to be four times that height, i.e. 120 feet.”
I do not think that Drake himself ever saw Cape Horn. We have two accounts of his passage, one by his chaplain in the Golden Hind, Francis Fletcher, the other by a Portuguese pilot, Nuno da Silva, whom Drake had captured with a ship he took off the Cape Verde Islands earlier in his voyage. Apparently da Silva accompanied Drake quite willingly for the sheer interest of adventuring into the unknown South Sea, for when Drake freed his other captives da Silva stayed with him. Piecing together Fletcher’s and da Silva’s accounts, and deducing Drake’s navigation from them, I am convinced that Drake never rounded Cape Horn. He was driven west-south-west for 14 or 21 days (the accounts are indefinite about the length of time), he then sailed back over his track for 7 days as soon as the north-east gale had blown out. He fetched up at the Diego Ramirez Islands, where he anchored in 20 fathoms at the range of a big gun from the land. According to the Admiralty Pilot there is an anchorage close eastward of the middle of one island in a depth of 16 fathoms with a sandy bottom. I am convinced that Drake never saw Cape Horn, but discovered the Diego Ramirez Islands and correctly deduced, because of the big swell that rolled in from the Atlantic when the north-easterly gale was blowing, that there was a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans there.
I aimed to pass between the Diego Ramirez group and the Ildefonso islands, and to round Cape Horn between 40 and 50 miles south of it, I wanted to give the Horn a good clearance, because it is a bit like Portland Bill in the English Channel—the closer to the Bill you pass, the more turbulent the sea, especially with wind against tide. The water diverted by the Bill has to accelerate to get past it, and, in addition, the bottom shelves, so that the current is accelerated again because of the same amount of water having to get through where there is only half the depth. It is exactly the same case with the Horn, only the rough water extends 40 miles south of it instead of 6 miles and where a 40-knot wind would bring a turbulent, 6-foot sea by the Bill, it will be an 80-knot wind with a 60-foot sea off the Horn.
At midnight on Saturday-Sunday, March 18-19, I was approaching land. I was 134 miles from the Ildefonso Islands and 157 miles from the Diego Ramirez Islands. The nearest land was at the entrance to the Cockburn Channel, which Joshua Slocum had made famous. That was only 75 miles to the NE by N. The barometer had been dropping steadily for forty hours now. I got up and went into the cockpit, to find out what chance I might have of sighting land ahead. It was raining steadily. The big breaking seas showed up dazzling white with phosphorescence, I would say up to 100 yards away. The falling-off, seething bow waves were brilliant white. The keel was leaving a weaving tail like a comet 50-100 feet long, and under the surface. I thought that one would be lucky to sight land 300 yards ahead. This would pose a nutty problem for me next night if I didn’t sight any land during the day. If the weather continued I should be lucky to get a fix, and with the strong currents known to be there, my fix of the day before would not reassure me much. I was uneasy about fixes with no checks since Sydney Heads: suppose I had been making a systematic error in my sights … But it was no good thinking like that. I realised that I must trust my navigation as I had done before.
I was lucky, and I got a sun fix at 09.22 next morning. That put me about 40 miles south-west of the nearest rocks off Tierra del Fuego. I was 77 miles due west of the Ildefonso Islands, and 148½ miles from Cape Horn.
There was a massive bank of cloud, nearly black at the bottom, away to the north, and I supposed that it was lying on the Darwin Mountains of Tierra del Fuego. There was no land in sight, although the nearest land was only 50 miles off. I now had a big problem to solve—where should I head? My then heading of 78° would lead me to Duff Bay and Morton Island, 15 miles north of the Ildefonsos. But I could gybe at any time, because the wind had backed to west by north. My main problem was this: if I kept headed for the Ildefonso Islands and Cape Horn, which was nearly in line with them, I should reach the islands in eleven hours’time, i.e. at 22.00 that night, which was three and a half hours after dark. This was too risky, because if it rained or snowed I should be unable to see the islands close to. The trouble was that if I bore away from the Ildefonsos, I should then have to cope with the Diego Ramirez Group. The bearing of that batch of rocky islets was only 22 ° (2 points) to starboard of the Ildefonsos. These islands have no lights, and are inhabited only for part of the year.
It was clear that I should not reach the islands until after dark. The currents were strong here in the neighbourhood of the Horn, running up to 22 miles per day in any direction in fine weather, and up to 50 miles a day in stormy weather. My fix of 09.30 that morning seemed a good one, but at the back of my mind was still the gnawing doubt about my sun navigation, with no check since Sydney Heads, 6,575 miles back. (It was unfortunate that I had made that blunder in my sun fix earlier, on the day before I appeared to have made the big 217 miles day’s run.) I could avoid both groups of islands by gybing and heading south-east till dawn; that was safe tactics, but it meant quite a big detour, which I resented. I tried to puzzle out a dog’s leg route which would take me between the islands in safety.
At noon the wind shifted, veering suddenly, which put me on a heading of north-east, so I gybed. Then the sun showed through the heavy clouds, and I got a sextant sight. This checked my latitude, for which I was very grateful. I had just finished plotting the result, and had decided on my best heading, when the wind backed in a few seconds from north-west to south. In a matter of minutes it was blowing up to a strong gale, Force 9. I dropped the mainsail, the jib and the genny staysail in turn. I set the spitfire, and found that was enough sail. “I wish,” I logged, “that this famous visibility following a wind shift would prove itself! I should just love to get a glimpse of those islands.” Until then I had been heading straight for the Ildefonso Islands, and now I decided that the time had come to change course and head midway between the two groups of islands. This put the wind slightly forward of the
beam, so I hoisted a storm staysail with the spitfire jib. The barometer had suddenly risen 6½ millibars in the past hour or two. I hoped that the wind would not go on backing into the southeast, which would make it very awkward for me. By 21.00 that night the wind had eased to 15 knots at times, but with periodic bursts of up to 36 knots. I hoisted a bigger staysail, but with only the two headsails set the speed was down to 4 knots between the squalls. I decided to put up with this until I had got away from the proximity of that rugged land, so notorious for williwaws.
By midnight the barometer had risen 9½ millibars in the past 7 hours. It was a little less dark out: I could tell the difference between sea and sky.
If my navigation was all right, I should be now passing 18 miles south of the Ildefonso Islands, and at dawn I should be passing 12 miles north of the Diego Ramirez group. It was so dark that I did not think it worth keeping a watch, so I set the off-course alarm to warn me if there was a big wind shift, and I also set an alarm clock to wake me at daybreak. Then I put my trust in my navigation and turned in for a sleep. For a while I lay in the dark with the boat rushing into black night. I used to think I would be better off going head first into danger (in Gipsy Moth III I lay feet forward); but I still had the same fear. What would it be like if she hit? Would she crack with a stunning shock and start smashing against the rocks in the breakers? If I could reach the life-raft amidships could I get it untied in the dark, then find the cylinder to inflate it? In the end I slept, and soundly too.
Daybreak was at 05.00. It was a cold, grey morning. The wind had veered right round again to west by south, and the barometer was steady. There was nothing in sight anywhere, which was as it should be. The sea was pretty calm, so I decided to head directly for Cape Horn, instead of passing 40 miles to the south of it as I had planned earlier, in order to avoid the turbulent seas to be expected if closer to the Horn, and if a gale blew up. I decided to hoist the trysail and went on up to do so. I was excited about changing course to east by north after setting the trysail, because changing course northwards there meant changing course for home. I was then 40 miles from the Horn.
Gipsy Moth Circles the World Page 21
