March 11 and I downloaded the weather map. A system was headed my way. It didn't appear too bad and anyway, I was already pointed south. Still, intuition told me otherwise. Sure enough, the next report had the storm increasing in intensity and heading south, as well. Gust of 55 knots were forecasted which down there could be ugly. I kept going. The barometer kept falling, quickly reaching what had been predicted for the next day. I should be feeling winds now and I’m not. A bad sign. After lunch the forecasted winds began and I shortened sail, took the mainsail down to three reefs and shortened up on the headsail. My hip started hurting, a particularly biting pain. I was certain then that trouble was coming. Minoru was already around the Horn, but Neil Hunter was behind me and a bit to the north. We both agreed that the forecast was wrong, but he thought me overly concerned.
In less than two hours the barometer fell another 10 millibars. I lashed the mainsail down and shortened the headsail even more. Thirty-five knot winds. I am scared. What am I doing here? If I get out of this storm, I won’t tempt fate no more. I returned to my chart table. I was 300 miles from the Horn and 200 miles off the coast of Chile. I set the GPS navigation guard zone on those closest rocks.
Do I have enough room to get by? Assuming 70 knot winds are behind me, even running under bare pole, I’d be making 6 knots which would clear me around the Horn. At sunset the bottom fell out of the barometer, 30 millibars lower than predicted. I sent an e-mail message to Gwen. I said, “We have a problem here.” At dark come 60 knot winds. I was running under bare pole with the wind vane steering. I put on a double harness. The winds gusted to 70 knots and I started taking knockdowns. I sensed a huge sea building, a shift of motion in the boat. I was helming and began to override the wind vane. Still we took knockdowns. Pitch black dark, but that isn’t a surprise. I hadn’t seen the sun all day. By midnight the winds were gusting to 84 knots, the worst I’d ever seen. The boat was totally out of control. She was surfing on monster waves, waves unseen and unheard. The wind shrieked through the rigging, squealed and howled like an angry alley cat. The tips of the waves were blown horizontally into my face, assuming there was a horizontal.
I’ve heard others say this: thank goodness it was pitch black dark. If I had been able to see my actual circumstances, I’d have lost heart. I don’t want to see. On the other hand, in such visual isolation, there are no reference points, no horizontal, no vertical, just what is perceived. Under these conditions the imagination can be as dangerous as the sea. I began to come off those waves at what must be a 45 degree angle. Pitch poling seemed likely. The boat would go end over end. I couldn’t leave the tiller. The wind vane couldn’t do this alone. Under bare poles the boat was surfing at 12 to 14 knots—faster than I’ve ever sailed her. I was headed due east towards the rocks of the South American coast. That means that if the storm lasted another 24 hours, I was finished. I’d been over the charts. There are channels among those islands, but I’d never find them under these conditions. I was trying to push the boat southward, suggesting to her that we push that way.
In this black night, I came up close to the South American coast, and the Horn was another 45 minutes of latitude below me. It’s best to round the Horn not to bounce off it. Still if I turned directly to the south, the seas would be broadside and the boat would roll—roll over, and over, and over. The path was narrow and my control limited.
I felt each wave pick up the boat and then pass under her. We were of no more concern to that ocean than a paper airplane sent out into the stratosphere. An incredible feeling. I was going as fast as I’d ever gone in a race. On the one hand I’m frightened and on the other I’m feeling this passionate joy and on the third hand I feel totally at peace with myself. A rush of pure adrenalin in my bloodstream like I’d never experienced had coupled with the calm of someone who thought they were perched on the top of the world.
Well, not quite the top. Every so often a wave came along and I felt the boat rising but not rising as it had on the previous wave. I knew then that I was inside a tunnel of water and in a moment I would feel the wave break. It was breaking behind me and in front of me and then straight on top of me. Totally submerged in the cockpit, I held my breath. Overhead was five or ten feet of water.
On and on this went. The boat was nothing more than a surfboard and the waves like those pipelines the Hawaiian surfers ride through. I was inside the tube. I was gagging and gasping for breath half the time. I had on double harnesses but no lifejacket. A life jacket would have only been trying to pop me up to the top of these waves. And in the midst of all that I’m suddenly going 15-16 knots, then 17, 18 and the boat’s over on her side--a total knockdown, a 100 degree inversion. I’m half underneath the boat and clinging to a web of rope that’s twisting around like spaghetti. The mast is in the water, the keel in the air.
That’s the closest I have ever come to being dead, of getting death’s grim wink, and yet it was also the closest I’ve ever felt to being absolutely alive, being so alive that death had somehow become incidental. Not that I planned on dying. That sudden burst of speed had been caused by the lashing of the mainsail giving way. Up the mast went the sail and over I’d gone.