ROUNDING CAPE HORN

Breaking bread with Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Skip Novak and Jean-Luc Van Den Heede? Then you’d better be a good listener. Dick Durham is all ears at the annual Cape Horners’ dinner

- Dick Durham

There is not a sailor in the world who does not recognise the craggy, conical peak of Cape Horn. It is, like it or not, the ultimate sailing goal, the siren of all nautical aspiration, the rubicon, once crossed, that bestows sailing spurs upon the voyager. Cape Horn's lure haunts everyone from the man in the creek to the ocean voyager.

And yet more people - many more - have ascended Mount Everest (11,996) than doubled Cape Horn (2,319). Of the Cape Horners, 1,975 were crews, only 194 were solo non-stop circumnavigators, and the remaining 150 sailed round with stops.

Not a single sailor who has rounded Cape Horn ever forgets it, and it is the most human of desires to want to share it with others. It is for this reason that the International Association of Cape Horners (IACH) was founded in 1957. It was created as an associate body of the French Amicale Internationale des Capitaines au Long Cours Cap Horniers, founded two decades earlier in St Malo. Since then, sailors from all over the world have joined forces to share experiences of those who've been there and to enlist adventurous Cape Horners into a Hall of Fame based in Les Sables d'Olonne.