In the second weekly report on his 4,500-mile trip in the South Atlantic, Theo Dorgan rounds Cape Horn in a storm and sails on to the Falkland Islands

We lay all night to anchor in Caleta Martial, a desolate bay in the Wollaston Islands. The wind was gusting to 50 knots so everyone took an hour on anchor watch, wondering if the hook would hold. I think that we all of us, in those solitary hours, had the same nagging thought: if the wind got any stronger, would we be able to get round next day?

Towards morning the wind dropped a little, and at 7.30am it was time to weigh anchor, turn our bows out into a rising southwesterly and face the Horn.

We raised and unshackled the anchor, sent it below into the forepeak, not to be seen again until Cape Town. In what seemed like very little time we were charging down the west side of Cape Horn. The wind steadily came up to 45 or 50 knots, but the boat was tracking like a train, shouldering aside four-metre waves, ploughing on to the south. The turn comes at Cathedral Rocks, and as we prepared to gybe east an enormous rainbow rose up before us in the glittering sunshine, flashing in the great white bow-wave.

We ran in under that rainbow as we rounded, in under the great arch of light as our bow came around smoothly. And there it was at last: the fabled south face of Cape Horn, towering to our left as we bowled past.

It was everything we had hoped for, and perhaps a little more. It would have been such an anti-climax if the seas had been low, the passage unremarkable.

The log records it as sober fact: we rounded Cape Horn in a storm force 10. It's too soon to come to terms with the exhilaration we all felt; the sense of accomplishment, sure, but also the profound sense of trust in ourselves, in the boat, in the skipper and crew. I thought of the many stories I'd read, of desperate skippers trying to hold their course as their boats were beaten apart, as their crews' nerve or strength failed, and I knew that we were lucky, that fortune had looked on us, considered us, and let us go past.

Here is a graveyard of ships, and the bones of thousands lay under our keel as we scythed past, going east, the lucky way, and heading for home.

My great-grandmother died here, in childbirth, on the White Star ship, Rimutaka. She would have been wrapped in heavy canvas, weighted, sent over the side on a canted board as the captain read from the service for the dead. My beloved grandfather was luckier, for someone was there to wet-nurse him all the way home to Cork.

It struck me with considerable force that here was a key source for my own life, for the life of our whole extended family, so long unvisited.

I wrapped the ferryman's fee, a handful of Chilean coins, in a small tricolour I'd brought with me, and dropped the small bouquet over the stern. It dropped without trace into the foaming wake.

East, then, for 20 miles, then north-east for the Falklands/Malvinas.

The wind dropped for an hour or so, then built again into 48 hours of hard sailing, with gales or near-gales from Thursday to Saturday. It was relentless and very tiring, but we settled to it, we did what had to be done.

All of us silent and thoughtful. We cleared in to Stanley with Tony Macken from Cork in charge. It's been a feature of this trip that the skipper, Steve Wilkins, puts someone different in charge at each key moment of the trip. Wilkins is a consummate seaman, one of the very best I've ever met, and a gifted teacher. His style is to keep us constantly under guided pressure.

Tony came up trumps, of course, and we entered Stanley with the Irish tricolour flying proudly on the port side. There's an historical resonance to this - we were remembering Conor O'Brien, who put into Stanley around 80 years ago in his boat, Saoirse, as far as I know the first yacht to fly the tricolour of the infant State and certainly the first Irish boat to circumnavigate the world.

Stanley, in a nutshell, is Chile's Puerto Williams recast as an English suburb. A somewhat ramshackle waterfront, tiers of clapboard houses mostly painted white with bright blue, red or green roofs and tiny lawns surrounded by picket fences.

At dinner that night it finally begins to dawn on us that we've come here from the Horn, that we have joined a mythic band. We know full well that many have had more arduous passages, and we're in no danger of losing the run of ourselves, but there is a real and palpable sense of achievement. We went there, we did that, we survived. We can call ourselves Cape Horners.