I can not believe it. We are there at last. I cried.
Mackerel sky with blue – the best sunrise ever over Cape Horn, which was gentler, more like a mountain than I expected and much less desolate.
We were only two or three miles away. We saw it clearly.
The guys have been like schoolkids on an outing – now they’ve found the sweet shop.
Gentle breeze – due aft (Westerly at last). The crew broke out the stun'sls, the fair weather sails, and thought of rigging them.
Scottish Graeme was in his shorts again, because he'd promised or bet someone he would go round Cape Horn in his britches.
“The Horn’s putting on a show,” said Joe the mud-doctor to my right. He was wearing his charity shop evening dress over boxer shorts. It was around dawn. He looked like a demented, very tired, penguin.
We were all slightly mad that morning. It was, for every single one of us, the culmination of a lifetime's hopes and aspirations.
To taste real adventure, to sail somewhere special, to fulfil ourselves, to find out what it all really meant, being alive, risking disappointment, making it at last.
It was our own very special spectacular. Even as I was writing, the sky started to cloud over. Later, the wind hit us hard - up to Force 11 - and, in the next twenty four hours, we sailed the most nautical miles in a day that Endeavour had ever achieved - 202 miles in 24 hours - hot shit!
Screaming along.
Before that, as we drifted past the legendary place in balmy sunshine, I sketched the outline of the Horn in my notebook – twice – and I never sketch anything, because I am so bad at it.
It was a geat day – with a drop of fizzy wine to celebrate and a very genuine party mood.
The Captain produced souvenir tee shirts for us all – a million pictures were snapped and swapped.
Jane, Kate and Tiff at Cape Horn
We formally passed the crucial longitude (67 degrees 16 minutes W) at 09 20 exactly but by 1030 or 1100 it was like New Year’s day or late on Christmas Day, “oh, that was fun, that was special, what do we do now?”
So we cleaned the Captain’s cabin and double reefed and set the main topsail and I tried for a noon shot with my sextant and wrote the final verses for my song.
Oh, what a day, what a scene!
Oh what a place to have been!
Cape Horn at Dawn - 16th. April, 2002
I cannot do justice to it. Nearly ten years later, thinking back on it, revising what I wrote, I cannot do justice to it. Almost nothing in my life has meant so much as seeing Cape Horn at close quarters and sailing slowly round it on that wonderful ship, with those very special people after all the delays, the expectations, the frustrations and the privations - there we were, on that morning, on that day, with the sun rising above the peninsula which is Cape Horn and filling the sky with beauty.
Magic.
I hope I remember it until the very moment when I die.
I think I probably will
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