davidd's A Doll A Day Challenge 2020

[davidd]

(Cape Horn???!!!  I hate you )

For what little it is worth, I thought about you as we rounded Cape Horn! Yes, seriously! I knew you would find it fascinating... and that you might be a little bit envious!

No tatts and no earring, because sailing around Cape Horn doesn't seem like it should really count when you're on a gigantic cruise ship. And technically, we did not fully "round the horn." The ship sailed through the Beagle channel and the Chilean fjords from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Then, because weather conditions were favorable, the captain reversed course in the open ocean and sailed back to the Pacific, then back-tracked again so we would sail past Cape Horn. In a way, then, we rounded, or at least passed, the horn twice. But another interpretation would be that we didn't truly sail around Cape Horn.

There was also a seemingly abandoned four-masted sailing vessel in the harbor of a small port city called Punta Arenas in southern Chile. I asked a couple of the local guides about it, and they did not seem to think it was anything worthwhile and knew nothing about it. One guide said, "oh, there are lots of abandoned ships like that around here."

Online research now that I am home indicates that the ship is the County of Peebles, built in 1875 and one of the last surviving four-masted windjammers in the world. It was beached and built in to a breakwater in the early 1960s. For a number of reasons, I could not get close enough to get a good picture, but here you can see it through the window of the port of entry office:

County of Peebles 4-Masted Iron Windjammer in Punta Areñas, Chile – January 2020

I have no doubt that one of these days you will round Cape Horn on a tall ship, the way it should be done! (Although I don't know if they risk taking any of the surviving tall ships around the horn these days. So maybe on a sailboat, at least.)

Another article about County of Peebles: https://silverfox175.com/2019/03/27/a-sa...fine-ship/