A voyage round Cape Horn and through the Beagle Channel is interrupted by an encounter with a submerged rockDallas Murphy, here cruising in Sachem, Block Island Sound, is also a novelist and oceanographer. Photo: Michael Grimm\u2018Rounding the Horn \u2013 Being a story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives \u2013 a deck\u2019s eye view of Cape Horn\u2019. So reads the front cover of Dallas Murphy\u2019s book of the same name. Settling in for a good long read of this work is a pleasure a sailor doesn\u2019t come across every day.
\nMurphy signs aboard one of Skip Novak\u2019s yachts, Pelagic, under Captain Hamish Laird and his mate Kate Ford to cruise south from the Beagle Channel. He is a journalist and a novelist, so you\u2019d expect his account to be well written, but this remark, as bland as a school report, does not begin to do him justice.
\nThe construction of the book, its widely varying content and the descriptions of personal experience are a rare class act. Meticulously researched historical references are blended with hands-on accounts of present-day action in these remote seas. We join Dallas and his shipmates soon after dark, bound from Puerto Williams towards the archipelago of the Horn.
\nFrom Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy
\nThe haze that had materialised with full dark suddenly lifted \u2013 maybe it had never been there at all, another atmospheric trick. The taut horizon distinguished water from air, and the sky filled with stars we\u2019d never seen before except on charts. A strange, indistinct brightness arced over our masthead light like a scattering of luminescent powder \u2013 from Puerto Williams to Caleta Martial.
\nDick stood up on the side deck and looked aloft. \u201cI wondered if we\u2019d see them.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat? See what?\u201d
\n\u201cThe Magellanic Clouds.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d
\n\u201cWell, maybe it\u2019s only one cloud. I can\u2019t tell. It\u2019s another galaxy, you know, that orbits the Milky Way. It\u2019s only visible in the Southern Hemisphere.\u201d
\nWe all went forward for a better view.
\n\u201cThere are two, actually, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.\u201d
\nAs we stared, they seemed to expand, smudging the entire southern sky with dusty white light. Hamish joined us, peering up nearly vertically, losing our balance every now and then in the swells, scrabbling for handholds.
\n\u201cDo you see two clouds, Hamish, or just the one?\u201d
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know. I can never tell.\u201d
\nDallas Murphy\u2019s Cape Horn archipelago adventure was aboard Skip Novak\u2019s Pelagic. Photo: Silvia Varela
\nThey are indeed two separate galaxies, I later affirmed from a volume in the Pelagic public library. The Large Magellanic Cloud, which contains fifteen billion stars, is nearer to earth, 179,000 light-years against the smaller\u2019s 200,000 light-years. It dawned on us then that we were seeing the Southern Cross just below the arc of the Magellanic Clouds. Most of us had never seen either before, and again we stood staring in silence.
\nIt was nearing midnight when land appeared ahead, first a single ragged black point rising over the horizon, then another away to starboard, the high points of the Wollaston Islands. The next time I looked, 15 minutes later, solid black land loomed in irregular clumps against the lighter sky until land entirely blocked our way.
\nWe seemed to be going like a freight train toward a mountain range. It\u2019s remarkable how the sensation of speed increases when a boat is approaching a featureless coast at night. The mood changes.
\nI slipped below to plot our position for my own edification, and when I returned topside, I listened to Kate and Dick talking about what a suicidal move it would be to attempt Paso Bravo in the dark if we couldn\u2019t know precisely where we were. But we could.
\nWe\u2019re essentially the first generation of sailors in the history of ships who have the luxury of a dead-accurate fix at the press of a button when\u00ad ever we want it. Our global positioning system knows where it is on the surface of the earth within a few yards, and reports it to us in the age-old language of latitude and longitude. A machine that knows where it is from moment to moment also knows how fast it\u2019s moving over the bottom.
\nWe are, therefore, the first generation in thousands to know where the current is setting us without visual references. Drake, FitzRoy, Cook, and the other artists would never have attempted to nail a narrow cut like Paso Bravo in the dark. And we probably wouldn\u2019t be doing it if we had to rely on the GPS alone, since, as Hamish said, the chart isn\u2019t all that accurate.
\nIn other seas, the navigator can be fairly certain that the land and other obstructions are accurately charted. But you can\u2019t bet the boat on it down here. A spot-on position fix isn\u2019t much use if the land is drawn in the wrong place. The radar would show us exactly where the land was located.
\nBlack cliffs closing
\nWe were in the jaws now, and everyone was alert, bright-eyed, standing lookout for dangers impossible to see as the black cliffs closed in around us on port, starboard, and dead ahead. We had to crane our necks now to see the remaining sliver of lighter sky, still smudged by Magellan\u2019s galaxies. The navigator grows edgy in these circumstances, pencil tapping, now that he\u2019s committed to this hole in the wall; doubts can cloud his logic. What if this is the wrong hole? What if this turns out to be a cove, not a channel?
\nOnly known things, numbers and angles applied with practised technique, can assuage the anxiety. In Magellan\u2019s day, sailors suspected that navigators practiced necromancy, for how else could they know their way? I was glad not to be responsible for tonight\u2019s nav.
\nHamish called something from below. David leaned into the doghouse to relay instructions from the captain. \u201cHe said slow down.\u201d
\nDriving, Kate pulled off several hundred rpm. \u201cTell them to come right ten degrees.\u201d Hamish meant to clear his angle of approach, take it right down the middle.
\nI relayed the order to the helm, then came back to watch the course adjustment take shape on the screen. Hamish was using dividers to measure distances right off the screen \u2013 nothing is as accurate as a radar range if you read it right. He drew circles of position on the chart. \u201cNow come back left those same ten degrees.\u201d
\nWhen I returned to the screen after passing the message, I saw the bottleneck gap at the bottom of the channel about one hundred yards ahead, and we were on it. All we had to do was hold our present course. He\u2019d set it up beautifully. We had almost reached the open water of Canal Franklin when we struck bottom. Hard. That sound is appalling. A high, hollow thunk with the pitch of finality about it.
\nNow I don\u2019t want to seem an expert on groundings, saying that the sound causes every muscle in the body to contract simultaneously, adrenaline gushing. Then everything turns sharp-edged with a terrible clarity, and events slow as the crucial question \u00ad\u2013 \u201cHow bad is it?\u201d \u2013 floods in. Has the inrush begun? Are my feet still dry?
\nIt took a moment, while the dreadful sound was still bouncing around the inside of the hull, to understand that Hamish was gone. I recalled a blur shooting up the companionway that must have been him.
\nI snatched a headlamp from a hook on the bulkhead above the nav station, scurried forward into the cold workshop compartment, and pulled up the floorboards to look for water. There was none; her innards were dusty dry. It would take a torpedo to hole Pelagic\u2019s hull. But her hull hadn\u2019t hit, I realised, because we were still moving, or more precisely because we hadn\u2019t come to a spine-snapping halt. She\u2019d run right over the rock.
\nSense of relief
\nI went topside. Kate stood clutching the wheel with both hands, eyes flashing in the red glow of the compass light, and when I clapped her lightly on the shoulder, she giggled and shook her head. The others were all crowded onto the foredeck, leaning outboard stabbing at the waterline with beams of white light as they moved aft, chattering, laughing at their own dark jokes, because they knew they\u2019d find no holes, dents, or dings.
\nIt was clear to us now what had happened. The keel had struck a deeply submerged rock, and the impact had kicked the keel back up into its box, as designed, harmlessly. Had the keel been fixed permanently to the bottom of the boat in typical fashion, one of two things would have happened, both bad.
\nThe keel would have been torn off completely, leaving a big hole in the bottom, or else it would have been driven up through the cabin floor, making a somewhat smaller hole in the bottom. But even if neither of these worst-cases had been obtained, Pelagic would have come to that vicious sudden stop, and only the lucky would have escaped injury.
\nRounding The Horn by Dallas Murphy is available from Basic Books, RRP: \u00a39
\n\u201cThere was only one rock, right?\u201d asked Hamish. \u201cWe only struck one.\u201d
\n\u201cNo,\u201d said Kate, \u201cI heard two thunks.\u201d
\n\u201cYou know what we should do, Kate? We should go back and find the rock with the keel and plot it on the chart.\u201d
\n\u201cNooo.\u201d
\n\u201cThen we\u2019d have the discoverer\u2019s right to name it. Pelagic Rock\u2026 Sorry about that untoward bit, gentlemen.\u201d
\nWe didn\u2019t mind.
\n\u201cYou know, I\u2019ve been through this pass a dozen times in daylight and never hit that thing. I was just ten feet one side or the other.\u201d
\n\u201cWhere am I going?\u201d Kate asked. \u201cCould I have a heading, please?\u201d
\nCalera Martial on the east end of Isla Hermite lay only three miles away across the narrowest part of Canal Franklin, but it took two hours before we had Pelagic securely attached to the bottom. Bleary-eyed but unready for sleep, we slouched around the ship\u2019s table, and after passing a bottle of Bermudan rum, Dick proposed a toast to lifting keels.
\nThe conversation shifted fluidly, fragmented and reformed, settling on near-disasters and marine absurdities we could laugh at because they were past. So I didn\u2019t realise at first when Hamish was talking in his understated mode about this young Norwegian sailor called Jarli, a friend of his and Kate\u2019s, that he was missing. It wasn\u2019t going to be a funny story, we realised. We discontinued our own to listen.
\nDangerous adventure
\nKate and Hamish had met Jarli in Ushuaia. He was just 18, and, Kate said, he looked like the Hollywood version of a Viking. In this 26ft cheap plastic boat powered by weak, blown-out sails and a tiny outboard mounted on a rickety stern bracket, he\u2019d sailed down the east coast of South America to Ushuaia.
\nHe meant to cross the Drake Passage bound for the Antarctic Peninsula in that toy boat \u2018to see the birds and seals.\u2019 He\u2019d picked up a young California surfer dude, Dave, who had no sailing experience, hanging around the docks looking for adventure. After politely thanking old hands like Hamish and the Poncets on Damian II for their warnings against it, Jarli and Dave sailed south.
\nSix weeks passed, and when Pelagic returned to Ushuaia, Kate and Hamish searched the harbour and asked around town, but no one had seen Jarli. \u201cYou mean you think he\u2019s dead?\u201d asked Jonathan, right to the point. Hamish shrugged, paused, and said: \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to cross the Solent in that bloody Clorox bottle.\u201d Kate peered silently into her empty glass.
\nUp on deck, we saw black islands and the Magellanic Clouds, but the Southern Cross had set. There has of late been much talk in boating circles (and mountaineering) about responsibility, because if you go missing in other seas, someone is going to search for you, perhaps at risk to their own lives, and therefore you have a responsibility to your would-be rescuers.
\nYou own the broad right to commit reckless acts in boats only if they don\u2019t endanger others. Trouble is, people expect to be rescued. That wasn\u2019t an issue down here. No one would launch a search for Jarli. A faint glow was visible in the east when we went below.
\nFirst published in the October 2020 issue of Yachting World.
\nThe post Sailing Cape Horn on Pelagic: An extract from Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy appeared first on Yachting World.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A voyage round Cape Horn and through the Beagle Channel is interrupted by an encounter with a submerged rockDallas Murphy, here cruising in Sachem, Block Island Sound, is also a novelist and oceanographer. Photo: Michael Grimm\u2018Rounding the Horn \u2013 Being … <\/p>\n