News Archive
3 March 2006
Close to the action
As I write, Cape Horn is being blasted with 70mph winds and 10m waves. The Chilean coastguard has been in regular contact with me, monitoring my position. The Commander, Mario Montejo apologised for a late response to one of my position reports because he was dealing with an incident involving one of the boats in the Volvo round-the-world yacht race. The fleet is going round Cape Horn at present, east-about, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. It seems that one of the race boats was sinking and had to put into Ushuaia. Am I glad to be out of there! The storm frequency around Cape Horn during the summer months is 10%, rising to 40% in the winter, but the severity of the summer storms is often worse. I knew I would take more than ten days to get round and therefore I was almost certain to be hit by bad weather. There is an element of luck and the crews on the Volvo boats are being hammered despite the winds and current being in their favour. I am trying to get north as quickly as possible and am making good progress. I am still close enough to Cape Horn though that I might get a little bit of a back-hander from the weather there at the moment. This morning I went on deck and for the first time in more than six weeks felt the warmth of the sun on my face. For ten days, I have not seen blue skies, but right now, the sun is out, the sea is sparkling, the sky is blue.