It was blowing Force 12 off Cape Horn fifty years ago today. I know because I was there.
I had sailed from San Diego on my engineless Ericson 37 cutter, EGREGIOUS, almost two months earlier, on my third attempt to round Cape Horn alone. The first two had ended because of rigging failure.
Three weeks out of San Diego the hull cracked and I began bailing water with a bucket.
In addition to no engine, EGREGIOUS had no electrical system and no plumbing. In an ironic attempt to have a dry boat I had her built with no throughhull fittings below the waterline. By the time we reached Auckland, New Zealand, after what became a five month almost 20,000 mile passage, I was bailing seven tons of water every twenty-four hours, never sleeping for more than an hour at a time before having to bail.
I continued on because I had little money left for repairs and after the first two failures I was going to become the first American to round Cape Horn alone or die trying. Extreme. But there is a quiet satisfaction in having proved to yourself that you are capable of making such a commitment.
As we moved into the Forties the temperature dropped and, although it was early December, the beginning of the Southern summer, the sky became completely overcast and snow fell.
I was navigating by sextant, as one did then, and for several days got no sights. Finally one afternoon I got a quick hazy view of the sun. You don’t get a position from a single sight, only a line that you are somewhere on. But that sight convinced me that I was far enough south to turn east, and just before dark a rocky shape formed in the gloom ahead that was one of the Diego Ramirez Islands, sixty miles southwest of Horn Island, and I knew that the next day I would be blown pass the Horn.
The wind increased during the night and by dawn was more than sixty knots from the southwest creating twenty to thirty foot breaking waves. While the land around Cape Horn is islands, they are so close together they form an almost solid mass and the waves were ricocheting off them and breaking on both quarters.
I went to bare poles and for one of the few times in what are now six circumnavigations tied myself in the cockpit and hand steered all day. Countless waves broke over the cockpit. Without being tied securely, I would have been washed away dozens of times.
EGREGIOUS was rolled onto her beam ends regularly, and in those cross seas sometimes she went over to port, sometimes to starboard. The strain on the tiller was immense, often forcing me to brace myself with my legs on the opposite side of the cockpit and use both arms to turn the bow downwind. There was no time to look back and see on which quarter the next dangerous wave loomed, but after a while I could tell by feel and sound. And though I caught only momentary glimpses of them as they swooped across my field of vision, even in the strongest wind albatrosses and petrels soared about as usual. At such moments you know that no matter how well you adapt, they belong there and you don’t. We do not conquer oceans or mountains. We merely transit them.
EGREGIOUS had an Aries self-steering vane. The servo-rudder was still in the water and as we surfed down waves a rooster tail rose from it as from a racing hydroplane.
Through a long, fatiguing day I steered. To have left the tiller even momentarily would have been impossible. Finally as the dim sky turned black, the wind decreased to perhaps thirty knots and I was able to get the Aries to steer us east still under bare poles, still making seven or eight knots.
Stiff and cold and tired and hungry, I stumbled into the cabin. My hands and feet were frostbitten and a glance in the mirror revealed dead skin hanging from my ears in bloody strips.
Water was sloshing over the floorboards. Before I could eat I had to bail. I took the plastic bucket, bent, scooped, turned and tossed.
I was profoundly happy. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
The water I was bailing into the Atlantic that night had come from the Pacific that morning.
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One of the greatest days in my life and one of only two sailing days of which I still remember the date. The other was November 2, 1974, the day I left for my first attempt at Cape Horn, the day that began the Being part of my life.
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