A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

FACED WITH A FORCE 11 FORECAST OFF CAPE HORN, ANDREW HALCROW CONSIDERS AN IMPOSSIBLE DECISION

- TOM CUNLIFFE

Rudyard Kipling famously wrote that the complete person can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. Most books of the sea end with some sort of triumph, be it a gentle circumnavigation or a race well won. Andrew Halcrow’s Into the Southern Ocean is cut from a different cloth. Having already sailed around the world through the tropics in his engineless, self-built yacht Elsi Arrub, he felt the need for harsher challenges and set out in 2006 to cross the Southern Ocean singlehanded, navigating entirely by sextant.

Having been foiled by a medical emergency, he vowed to do it again, from east to west against the prevailing wind. In 2013, a dismasting cut short this effort, but the book this Shetland islander wrote about his great voyage is stirring stuff. In this extract, he has just weathered the Horn, but is now faced with the certainty of a dangerously extreme storm. He has to decide whether to run for shelter or ‘ride it out’. The choice is far from simple and the description of his seamanlike decision-making is exemplary..

The good sailor weathers the storm he cannot avoid and avoids the storm he cannot weather,” (anonymous).

Elsi and I had rounded the Horn but the weather chart showed winds up to Force 9 which, by the way the forecasts had been going, could easily be Force 11. I had to try and make the most of the present fair wind to get offshore as far as I could and get some sea-room before it hit us. I really didn’t fancy being off the Horn in a Force 11 but there was a chance it might ease back a bit as it moved east. Even if it went down a little, I was sure we could cope with that.