A Night Approach to Cape Horn

HOUR AFTER HOUR, WE RUN TOWARD THE SHALLOWS BELOW TIERRA DEL FUEGO. Hour after hour, wind is west at 30 knots and the barometer remains fixed at 1008 millibars. I know this is how the low will come on: pressure lines will trend east-west until a steep and slanting wave arrives from the north. With it will come the inevitable front and more powerful winds. But that wave and its winds have been due for some time.

In the dark, I reach for a flashlight and train its beam on the barometer. The needle has not moved. I count to 300 and click the light again. The barometer reads the same.

I’ve eaten dinner directly from the pot and then quickly donned an extra layer of fleece while my belly radiates its receipt of lentil stew. Now I am crammed into the starboard settee of the pilot house, kitted up in foulies and ready. I’m on bigweather watch and will remain so for the duration of the blow.

Click the light again. My breath steams in the shaft of white. The barometer reads the same.

Mo is tearing along under a heavily reefed working jib. Beyond her rails, night has consumed the sea, but not utterly. Often during a gale, cloud obliterates both sky and sea. A graybeard is heard long before its boiling embrace emerges into the dim cast of running lights. Tonight though, there is a full moon behind the veil above. The sky glows eerily, and against it the heavers are perceived as faint changes in shades of blackness. Thankfully, there’s not much to them. Not yet.

Click the light. Count and click again. A falling barometer will be the first indication that our position in the low has changed, but still it reads the same.

This is a climax, of sorts. It’s March 20, 2019. Day 167 of the Figure 8 Voyage. Three and a half months ago, we rounded Cape Horn from the north. That early morning was cold and gray with a strong westerly and a spitting rain, but the easy sea allowed me to slide Mo in toward the great rock, even to kiss it on the shins as we passed. Then on we sailed beneath Staten Island and the Falklands and onward in our attempt to round the entire Southern Ocean, returning here for a second pass before heading toward the Arctic’s Northwest Passage.

The strategy for this second time around — to stay as far south as I dared — had been chosen for two reasons. First, at my target latitude of 47 degrees south, the circumference of the circle from Cape Horn to Cape Horn again was almost

Plunging breakers in the shallows between Diego Ramirez and The Great Cape.

“The main was down, the boom lashed to its crutch, the working jib was deeply reefed. Seas were still building.

2,000 miles less than at the more typical rounding latitude of 40 degrees south. Second, down here Mo would wallow in fewer calms. The continent-sized lows that wander below the capes tend to hoover-up everything around them, leaving vast windless spaces in between. The farther north of the lows one sails, the longer last the calms, the farther south, the more consistent the wind.

As it turned out, lack of wind would not be a problem. By early December, Mo and I were beyond the Falklands and had turned to the east when our first major gale approached. Its winds built during the day but really came to force overnight with the anemometer touching 45 knots and more. The main was down, the boom lashed to its crutch, the working jib was deeply reefed. Seas were still building. Near midnight, I was dozing fitfully in my bunk when I felt Mo lift on a wave; then there was a heavy slam as green water roared into the cockpit and threw itself against the companionway hatch. Mo rolled, and I rolled with her from my bunk onto the cupboards. As she righted, I could hear the tinkling and splashing of water in the pilot house.

I groaned at the thought that we’d yet again broken something vital. A year earlier, and during the first Figure 8 attempt, such a sea had put out a window. Grabbing a flashlight, I crawled to the pilot house. Here water dripped from the ceiling and streamed off flat surfaces, but there was no shattered glass. In the cockpit, the dodger’s plastic door was ripped open, the windvane paddle had been stripped from its socket and was gone; sheets were trailing in the water. It was a hard hit, but the wet below was merely from sea squirting in between the companionway hatch and the locked companionway slide. “Just keep the water out,” answered Eric Hiscock when others asked for his advice on a Southern Ocean passage. Easier said than done.

After that, the south dished up a succession of powerful lows, a gale a week on average. But Mo had weathered all, and my resolve to sail hard and fast through even the worst of it had paid off. Leave the storm jib in its bag had been the vow, and it had worked. Sitting in the pilot house as we made for our second approach to Cape Horn, I was weary but also warmed by the glow of success. Or rather, near success. We had this one last obstacle to overcome.

The metal body of the flashlight is cold in my hand. I click the light again. Now the barometer’s resolve has wavered; it reads 1007 mb. Within the hour, winds have veered into the

A GRIB file showing an intense low south of the Cape and Mo’s plotted course. northwest and increased to a standing 40 knots. On deck, I roll a fourth reef into the working jib. A pelting rain bites my cheeks. I begin to wonder at the intelligence of cutting in for the Horn on such a dirty night.

When the prudent mariner of a small yacht speaks of his Cape Horn approach, it should be understood that his target waypoint is actually south of a small group of islands called Islas Diego Ramirez that are themselves some 50 miles south of the great Cape. The reason for the Diego Ramirez heading is water, or rather a lack thereof. This group of rocks sits on the edge of the South American continental shelf, where depths rise sharply from out of the abyss to as little as 300 feet. In the relative shallows between Diego Ramirez and the Cape, seas can break with fury if weather has been running foul to the west or if one encounters strong winds here during a rounding. The likelihood of both occurring at the same time is not insignificant and serves to concentrate the mind.

The most famous, early stories of yachts encountering difficulties here were those of Miles and Beryl Smeeton, who, with John Guzzwell, attempted Cape Horn twice in their ketch, Tzu Hang. During the first approach in 1956, the yacht was pitchpoled in steep and breaking seas. Beryl, on watch in the cockpit, was swept overboard. The gale took both masts, damaged the hull, and left the boat half sunk. The saving of Tzu Hang on this occasion is a tale for the ages. Since then, it has become customary for small vessels to plan a rounding of Cape Horn via the deeper water. If weather looks to be moderate, as it did for Mo’s first pass, one can always alter course to the north.

By midnight, the barometer reads 1005; three hours later, 1003. Now winds are well over 40 knots; seas are building rapidly. I have thoughts of bailing out, of gybing around for the safer run under Diego Ramirez, but now the angle of wind and sea would make that an awkward course. I carry on.

Dawn. We are above and beyond Diego Ramirez and racing over shoal water, but now it’s not the depth that worries me so much as the east-setting current, which flows like a river around and around the Southern Ocean loop and must, necessarily, be shoved upward and accelerated as it meets these lifting depths.

At first there is no change, but as daylight comes on, the seas stack up and double in size in a matter of miles. Their blueblack faces become sheer, their crests crash in on themselves with an explosiveness that surpasses anything I’ve seen during these months in the south. Mo is being thrown. Frequently she surfs with a roar. Twice before 0800, she is laid over and scoops a cockpit full of water. Both times she recovers without any assistance from me. We race on.

I’m often asked why — why am I so attracted to long, offshore ventures? At first the question caught me off guard and

Above: In the south, chafe is a vessel’s worst enemy. Here Randall is renewing genoa sheets in a boisterous sea. Right: An immature wandering albatross glides in to inspect Mo’s decks. my responses were halting. Wouldn’t anyone, given the opportunity, put at the top of his priorities list a solo sail around the world? The answer for me is immediate affirmation. But to others and when the long days of discomfort are weighed in, the sleepless nights, meals eaten from a can, the perpetual, clammy damp, hands so raw the skin sluffs off, the gut-gnawing fear of an approaching storm, the inescapable wrath of a heavy sea, and months of exposure to a remoteness that makes the crew of the space station one’s nearest neighbors — when all that is known, most choose not to go to sea and regard as crazy those who do.

The Southern Ocean evokes my abiding interest because sailing here is like exploring an alien world. Down here, there isn’t the evidence of civilization that one finds in other, more hospitable oceans. Down here, there are no ships on the horizon, no jet contrails in the sky, no plastic trash ever clutters one’s wake. For months on end, there isn’t so much as a lee shore, and the waves, freed from such constraints, roam like giant buffalo upon a great, blue plain.

Moreover, down here, the animals one encounters live in such an open and pure wilderness that you are likely their first human encounter. Many days Mo and I are visited by that marvel, the wandering albatross. As big as a suitcase and with a 12-foot wingspan, this bird lives most of its life beyond the sight of land, and most of that time is spent flying. It can glide in any direction in any strength of wind; so adapted is it to this environment that it can even sleep while aloft. When my little ship is struggling to survive, this bird hangs in the air with an effortlessness that defies understanding. There, above that bounding wave, it is poised so still as to seem carved out of the sky.

Or take the stars. Here on a clear and moonless night, the heavens shine such that our brother constellations recede into the melee of twinkling and are lost. On such a night, looking upward with binoculars is like dipping one’s hands into a basket of pearls. Look down and galaxies of phosphorescence spin in Mo’s wake.

You ask me why? With my own eyes I have seen these things. That is why.

The low is due to blow itself out by early morning, but at 1100, winds are still 35 knots and gusting higher. We are below

At the height of a gale, Mo is passed by a mountainous sea with continuous break hundreds of feet wide.

the peninsula with Cape Horn several hours farther east, and I let Mo ease north to meet it. Though the cloud above us is beginning to thin, the coast is shrouded in fog, and it comes as a surprise when just after making the noon log, I sight land, a lone, dark hump on port beam, Cape Spenser.

On we rush in these mad seas, but the low is moving past and the day has become fine and bright. Then, just after 1500, the Cape heaves into view two points off port, awash in sunlight. Even at a distance, I can see the breakers throwing themselves at her feet. Gray, hulking rock not so much barren as raw, jagged, and torn from eons of facing the worst, and when the sky clears, always the sea remains and the Cape remains.

It has been 110 days since we last saw this rock, looping around with the express purpose of seeing it again. In that time Mo has sailed more than 15,000 nonstop miles in the Roaring Forties. What should I feel? Proud of the accomplishment? Humbled by the privilege of exploring so long this timeless and trackless sea? Lucky to have survived with boat and self intact?

Yes, all that, but not now. Now I only feel the relaxation of fatigue, of relief and release. After two tries, this circuit is closed. Wind is slowly easing. I let Mo push past the Cape with her reefs in. I make a hot dinner and then go to my bunk for a dreamless sleep. And under a night sky ablaze with the cold, blue light of stars, Mo sails on and on and on ...

This article was originally published in SAIL magazine, April 2021.

Above: Mo making fast time under a slate gray sky. Left: A tall sea just beginning to topple.

March 20, 2019. Day 166 of the Figure 8 Voyage. Mo and Randall complete a full circuit of the Southern Ocean with their second Cape Horn rounding, having sailed 15,343 miles in the Roaring Forties in 110 days.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Northern California, Randall Reeves, 59, grew up reading and dreaming of the sea. He learned to sail on the rivers of central California and often “borrowed” the family sailboat for solo ventures to the San Francisco Bay. These turned out to be formative escapades. While in college, Randall interviewed world-famous solo sailor Bernard Moitessier for his campus radio station. He began his own solo adventures in 2010 with a twoyear Pacific loop in a 30-foot ketch.

In October 2019, Randall Reeves became the first person to complete what he calls the Figure 8 Voyage, a solo circumnavigation of both the American and Antarctic continents in one season, this aboard Moli, a 45-ft aluminum expedition sloop built in 1989 by Dubbel and Jesse of Norderney, Germany. The double loop of the globe, comprising some 40,000 nautical miles sailed, lasted 384 days and took Randall twice around Cape Horn and up through the Arctic’s Northwest Passage. In 2020, Randall was awarded the Cruising Club of America’s Blue Water Medal.

Randall sent in daily posts from sea that included high-resolution photographs, which he has used to produce his first publication, a picture book of images from some of the remotest places on the planet. The Figure 8 Voyage book can be purchased on his website, figure8voyage.com.