When I signed up for this cruise, I knew I would be saying to people that it was sailing around Cape Horn, but I didn’t really know what that meant in detail. As this cruise has progressed, I spent more time looking at the map, familiarizing myself with the Chilean Tierra del Fuego Archipelago, and still, I wasn’t sure what sailing around Cape Horn meant. I did figure that after leaving Ushuaia and before heading to the Falkland Islands to the east, we would most likely sail down close to Isla Hornos to get a sighting of Cape Horn so that we could say that we had seen it. In our daily newsletter called, appropriately, Viking Daily, it advised us that from 8 to 10 AM we would be sailing around Cape Horn. Because Cape Horn is the point of demarcation between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, I always figured that sailing around Cape Horn meant going from west to east around the point established as the southern boundary of the known world. But Viking has chosen to do something better for us. It’s actually spending the two hours indicated in the Viking Daily by sailing down to and then 360° around Isla Hornos, so that none of us will have any doubt that we have sailed AROUND Cape Horn in.
The cruise director has decided to put the resident natural historian on the loudspeaker to describe in every which way imaginable what Cape Horn is all about. His commentary lasted about 30 minutes and was a good description of what you might find in Wikipedia with all of the details about the island and the history and climate of this distant place. Right now we’re at the halfway point around the island and it’s quite an amazing spectacle. As we’ve gotten to the Windward side of the island, looking into the morning sun through the mist and clouds, the wind and the waves have picked up and are giving us quite a show of force. It’s amazing to think that 24 x 7, for as long as the world has existed, a place like this takes a continuous beating from the elements, and that nature just keeps on keeping on, pounding away at the land and rocks of Isla Hornos.
But so it does and we are here to witness that nature in all its grandeur. We are reaching down into the Drake passage, buffeted by the waves that are trying desperately to find their way to the Atlantic Ocean and its calmer seas. We are about to turn our heading eastward to let the wind and waves push us instead of work against us so that we can find our way from the wilds of the South Pacific to the civilized waters that lead us, and those who have come before us, back home. It seems only appropriate that we are doing this in the morning so that we can turn ourselves towards the sun and the warmth that it promises ahead.
We’ve now made the turn and our next viewpoint, ironically enough, will be Staten Island, due east of Cabo San Diego, and the way to the penguins of the Falkland Islands.