Three well-known U. S. sailors, straddling sixty but still full of pickles, are taking Homefree, a custom Morris 51 to Cape Horn during the Austral summer of 05-06. Between us we have a century-plus in offshore experience, an easy dozen ocean crossings, a piecemeal circumnavigation or two, and over 400,000 logged blue-water miles.

We should know better, but the Chilean Canals and the bold coasts of Patagonia offer a challenge that is hard to put off any longer. Join us for an adventure our friends describe as “three troublesome malcontents on a lark to the only place left on earth that will have them.” If we can’t make you enjoy yourselves you simply aren’t trying. Jump aboard!

The Voyage
Cape HornCape HornCape Horn, is a pyramid of rock standing a lonely watch 1400 feet above the convergence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. There is no land to the west, no land to the east, all the way around the world. This is the very last foot of soil in South America and the next nearest footprint is in Antarctica 600 miles further south. No body of water on earth has more extreme weather more of the time than here. Ghosts of eight hundred ships and their crews haunt the cold waters. An old sailors’ lament of sailing in the Great Southern Ocean is that “south of forty degrees there is no law, south of fifty degrees there is no god.” To round Cape Horn a sailing vessel must dip below sixty degrees south. It is a place where the safety of reason gives way to chance and the odds of disaster are high.

Why go?
Magellan called it his “divine madness.” Drake sailed here as a “gentleman adventurer” looking for Spanish blood and gold to take for the Virgin Queen. Moitessier called it “the logical route.” Greed, revenge, spiritual growth, and what some call madness have all been a part of the mariner’s decision to “go to the Horn.” The whole of what makes us human plays into the decision. The crew of HOMEFREE has not tried to distill its own soup of emotions into a catchy subtitle for some blog that would be easily understood by anyone else. The Horn doesn’t care about your peculiar why or pass judgment on your personal motivation. This place is devoid of empathy. If any place has essence, consciousness, being, the Horn is one. It is there. It is Cabo de Hornos. Nowhere else on earth is quite like it. Why is not the question. When is.