The Ceramco Files- Rounding the Horn

by Peter Montgomery, Alan Sefton & Sail-World on 17 Sep 2006 Next week it is the 25th anniversary of the dismasting of Ceramco New Zealand. Over the next few days, Sail-World will be featuring a series of images and sound clips from one of the seminal moments in New Zealand yachting culture.

Extract from Ceramco New Zealand's log on the occasion of Rounding Cape Horn

Day 20: Wednesday, January 13. Noon position 55.OOS 65.18W
Day’s run 230 miles. Course 030 degrees.
Wind NNW 15 to 20 knots. Barometer 988.

We rounded Cape Horn at 0550hrs GMT — 0l50hrs ship’s time — 30 minutes or two to three miles astern of Flyer. Her masthead light was just visible ahead despite the heavy rain. The winds were light and the seas slight. We hadn’t had a Satnav pix for several hours so I’d asked the helmsman to harden up a little. Suddenly the Horn itself loomed ahead of us, directly ahead of our bow and barely discernible as a dark, misty shape. We bore away quickly to skirt the off- lying rocks then harden up again. We were only two miles off as we passed the Cabos and carried on towards the east. The winds were NE, blowing cold off the snow-covered mountain ranges of Tierra del Fuego away to windward.

We stayed on port tack for a while longer then dived inshore on starboard. Conny, for some reason, kept heading east, probably anticipating an easterly wind shift. It didn’t come. The breeze instead went NNW and we cracked sheets to head towards the Straits de le Maire, across the mouth of the Beagle Channel.

At 0ó00hrs, someone asked in the log: ‘Where is Flyer?’ The answer, at O800hrs, was ‘Behind us!’ The wind shift had put us in the box seat. We were inshore and 10 miles to windward of the Dutchman. We took some pleasure from the fact that although Conny was first past the Horn, we were the first actually around it and heading up the coast on the eastern side.

There seemed to be a lot of interest in our situation. A Chilean naval vessel called us on VHF. It had a French film crew on board. They never got their pictures because we were sailing faster than their craft could motor and they never caught up. Next came an Argentinian destroyer, on station to welcome us into Argentine waters. Then an aircraft with a radio reporter on board. I had to do an interview which he translated into Spanish and put out live on Radio Rio Grande in the largest population centre of Tierra del Fuego.

I got through to Radio New Zealand through Wellington Radio and spoke live
on Wayne Mowat’s ‘Tonight’ show, describing the Horn, fast disappearing astern, and the islands and coasts of Tierra del Fuego to an estimated 1 million listeners.

Quite a privilege and one which helped make this particular rounding (my second) one of the highlights of my sailing career.

To hear Peter Blake speaking live with Wayne Mowatt of Radio New Zealand by SSB (see bottom of story for link which can be played direct or saved to your desktop)

Log extract from 'Blake's Odyssey' reprinted by kind permission of Alan Sefton. Sound recording kindly provided by Peter Montgomery from his personal archives.