12-15 knots of NW wind, now and then a puff up to 18. The seas have abated too. It is nighttime, and we sail at about 6 knots, now less than 200 nm from the Horn.
Behind us are a handful of days in rough seas and forceful winds. For the moment, the legendary Cape Horn has decided to give us a few hours of peace and quiet. But a look at the forecast shows that it will not last for too long. Better to have a good sleep, a more relaxed night watch, and maybe also a calm day before hitting, once more, growing seas and increasing winds as we reach the Horn and head up the Atlantic coast.
It was the 10th of September when we all boarded the ship, right at the opposite side of the South Pacific. Today, the 17th of October, we find ourselves reaching the eastern shores of this ocean.
Cape Horn is now at close range, the South Atlantic Ocean extends behind us. There, we head on to what we can consider the next leg of our voyage, changing our course northward once we round the Horn.
To the south, about 500 nm of the Drake Passage, of which we will have a taste as we sail from the Pacific to the Atlantic around the southernmost tip of the Americas.
The southern extremity of a continent that had to wait until 1578, when Sir Francis Drake, in the course of his circumnavigation of the world, passed through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific Ocean. Before he could continue his voyage north, his ships encountered a storm and were blown well to the south of Tierra del Fuego. The expanse of open water they found led Drake to guess that, far from being another continent as previously believed, Tierra del Fuego was an island with open sea to its south. Unbeknownst to him, 52 years earlier, the Spanish navigator Francisco de Hoces had shared the same fate, being blown south by a gale in front of the Atlantic end of the Magellan Strait and reaching Cape Horn, passing through 56° S where they thought to see land's end.
This all meant that there actually was an end to the American lands, it was not part of a southern continent, and there existed a connection between oceans south of it. If so, it was possible to sail ships around. Open waters that had to wait until the Dutch Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten sailed along in 1616, the first ones to round Cape Horn. But still, the cartography of the area was not well known. The unpredictable violence of weather and sea conditions made exploration difficult, and it was only in 1624 that the Horn was discovered to be an island.
Not many ships ventured to use this new route until the 19th century, when sailing around Cape Horn along the northern area of the Drake played an important part in the trade system. The stormy seas and icy conditions made the rounding of Cape Horn through the Drake Passage a rigorous test for ships and crews alike, especially for the sailing vessels of the day.
It is already getting to the end of the day, a fantastic sailing journey under fair, light winds and a swell growing just to about 2 meters. Roughly 70 nm to reach the Cape, the closest land just about 20 nm away, the rugged Chilean south Patagonian coast. Actually, it was about to get dark at 21:00h when the call could be heard of “Land a’hoy,” the first sight of land in over a month.
The ocean depths are showing back now again in the depth sounder, less than 200 meters. For weeks, we sailed over abyssal plains reaching 4,000 meters.
A day to rejoice in the good sailing in a setting of better sea conditions and fair weather, a scene filled by hundreds of seabirds that seem to like and find their food along this zone of upwelling between the great depths and the continental shelf.
Clouds of Fairy prions fly low over the swell, Black-browed, Grey-headed, and Royal albatrosses glide around. Storm petrels perform their typical flutter, looking like they walk on the water’s surface. Diving petrels hurriedly get out of our way as we sail along. Here, the whole width of the South Pacific flowing eastward, with both predominant winds and the currents, bump into the South American continent. Part of it is deflected northward, becoming the Humboldt Current, flowing all the way to the Peruvian shores. Another branch keeps running east, squeezing through the Drake Passage—a narrowing in the flows between the Pacific and the Atlantic, a meeting point of two oceans, and a gathering area as well for open ocean wanderers, petrels and albatrosses, together with some species that don’t venture too far from land.