Cape Horn or bust

Steve Fossett's Cheyenne claws her way out of the Southern Ocean

Day 39
Position at 05050GMT: 55deg 05.255S 76deg 27.549W
Course/speed: 64deg 17.5 knots
TWS/TWA: 22.0 knots 290 deg

As Brian Thompson writes below, getting to Cape Horn seems to be taking forever for the crew of Cheyenne who this morning still have just over 300 miles before they round yachting's most formidable landmark.

Yesterday there were further problems with the giant catamaran's mast track - this time near the top of her 143ft high spar. Fortunately she is sailing under one reef and the crew are planning to wait until they are round Cape Horn before effecting a repair to this.
Unusually for this stretch of water Cheyenne's progress over the last two days has been dogged by light winds. Now the wind is building back into the 20s from the WNW and as the latest data above shows she is now sailing at 17.5 knots. At this pace we can expect Cheyenne to round the Horn later tonight.


Brian Thompson writes from on board:

Day 38 has just been completed with a rather painful 265 miles sailed, but it does however keep us 1,643 miles ahead of Orange. In this portion of the record they were flying so they may be a lot closer by the time we arrive at the Horn.

However, it is swings and roundabouts and we had some great conditions in the Indian Ocean which allowed us to draw ahead. Now it is our turn to have some slow days. Day 38 was our slowest since Day 2 at Cape Finisterre and this was due to a low pressure catching us from behind and parking almost over us. It is now starting to drift south allowing the faintest of breezes from the north to return. As we get further from the low today this wind should fill in to over 10 knots and allow us to finally make some progress.

We used the opportunity of the light winds today to fix the solent halyard that was lost when the spinnaker fell into the water. Earlier today Damian was up the mast dropping in a new mouse line and using it to draw up the halyard. Then we had to work at the mast base to remove some twists in the halyard, where it was wrapped around other halyards. Finally, Justin spent another hour up the mast rigging the halyard as a 2:1 system to halve the load on itself and hopefully reduce chafe. We kept going at full speed (about 8 to 10 knots) most of the time so the operation did not cost us any miles. We were working for about six hours on this and on various other smaller jobs and got the boat into good shape, we will continue with the maintenance tomorrow as there are still a few more jobs to do.

It’s great to have the solent halyard back as it makes changes to the gennakers much faster and makes us less reliant on the sole gennaker halyard to hoist all our sails.

It seems like we have been two days from the Horn for a long time. We are 580 miles away and now as the wind is returning we are hopeful that we may have finally made it under the two day barrier. After the Horn it looks like we have a couple of good days sailing up past the Falklands and then we are looking at potentially light and variable conditions from there up the South American coast. After about 30N where we should pick up the beginnings of the trade winds and be moving until the equator..

Brian