Call of the Cape: 'Pelagic Australis is the most reassuring boat I have ever set foot on, but it needs to be,' writes Theo Dorgan, in the first of a weekly series on his 4,500-mile trip in the South Atlantic.
We are tied up in Puerto Williams in Chile, the southernmost town in the world, near the eastern end of the Beagle Channel. It's a day for rig checks, watering, provisioning, clearing the boat for an ocean passage. The amount of work that needs to be done is astounding, but then we will be 11 people on a space capsule for five weeks when we leave here (apart from a 48-hour stop in the Falklands). We have to be self-sufficient in almost everything.We have the food we carry, the water we carry, and no more. Anything that breaks down has to be fixed out of our own resources.
We left Punta Arenas four days ago, and since then we have been steadily making our way down the maze of channels that is Tierra del Fuego. Imagine placing a large flat slab of baked clay on your kitchen table: now hit it in a dozen places with a heavy hammer, close your eyes and shuffle the pieces about, and pour water all over it. That will give you an idea of what we've been sailing through, a geological jigsaw.
It is a spectacular place, like sailing through a half-drowned Switzerland. Yesterday we motorsailed down through the Beagle in 45 knots of wind, with gusts of more than 70 knots. No bother to us. We had the mountains of Kerry on our right hand side, the high Alps to our left. Giant glaciers of blue ice flashed past, snow patches clung to the tops of the high peaks that roll back in ranks behind each other through utterly uninhabited country.
There is a wintry ice-clear feel to all this, white clouds flashing across a thin blue sky, except when the clouds roll down and the rain comes in sheets and the islands as you come across them seem to be floating somewhere between air and water.
There are times when it seems that the air is made of water, other times when a breath cuts like a knife.
Stopping at night is a matter of finding a sheltered cove, then tying off four great lines, two forward, two aft, to trees or boulders either side.
When you scramble ashore from the inflatable to tie up, it's tough heathery bushes, pungent leaf mould, tangled roots, corkscrew beeches with strange umbelliform spreads of leaf, a landscape familiar and strange.
Huge gusts can blow down off the high surrounding mountains with no warning at all, but with four lines out, and maybe the anchor down, we are absolutely secure.
Our boat, Pelagic Australis, is built for these waters, and already she has all our hearts. Tough aluminium hull, reinforced pilothouse, bomb-proof rig, she is the most reassuring boat I have ever set foot on, and she needs to be. You will never find a sailor to speak lightly of a passage round the Horn.
This is in all our minds now, the big questions: what will it be like? Will we be able for it?
Everyone here has huge confidence in the boat, and equally in the skipper. Steve Wilkins has more than 250,000 sea miles under his keel, most of it down here in the cold wet wastes of the South. The text book rangy Australian, he drives us hard, sometimes harder than we'd like to be driven, but there is intelligent purpose in what he's doing, born of long experience. He knows we will need to know what we're capable of in these waters, and he's building us into a crew that can be depended on.
And in truth we are a motley crew: a Slovak, an American, three British, an Italian and two Irish. Plus the two professional watch captains, live-wire Debs from New Zealand and Kevin from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
We have begun to look out for each other as attentively as we look out for the boat, because, very literally, our lives may depend on each other.
We have all of us very different reasons for being here, but we have this in common, a wish to test ourselves in one of the great human dramas. We play it down, of course, talking to each other; we take each step forward as it comes but we know, too, that in 48 hours from now we will have been put to the test. The weather files are coming in on the computer: a succession of lows moving at high speed, wind from the west and the south, there's snow up there and buckets of wind.
Tomorrow we move 60 miles to lie at anchor in the Wollaston Islands, waiting for our chance. By the time you read this we'll have been there. Or not. It's all down to the weather now.
