Good sailing into the Screeching 60’s.

A few days ago. Steady on the 30kn of a cold Westerly, the crew is on a mission to set the Fore Course. Tack is being pulled, bunts and clews eased. A sudden gust first, then the wind is sustained over the 40kn, making things more difficult. Halfway set, a seam gives up and a rip of about a meter opens. Quickly it is clewed up, bunts tight and the crew springs up the rig to furl it. Since then, it has been packed away, and when it hasn’t been blowing very hard, when the canvas is not frozen stiff and the weather is relatively dry, able hands had been aloft mending it.

Today was the day when it is finished and is ready again, and soon joins the rest of the sails that gradually had been set during the day. Wind has been veering to a fair and lighter northwest, the current pushing us eastward has eased too, and pointing high in the wind the ship can actually do some good westing. We sail following a course towards the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, set to go south of Elephant Island.

The Furious 50’s are now north of us and we enter the Screaming 60’s having a fantastic day of sailing. We have done 123nm over the ground and by the evening we find ourselves 300nm from any possibility of landfall in Antarctica. 200nm behind us lays the large tabular iceberg that we met not so long ago, the huge A23a.

From a biological and oceanographical point of view, it’s been already for a while that we sail in Antarctic waters, south of the Polar Front or Antarctic Convergence Area, but today having crossed the latitude of 60ºS, we are beyond the limits for the Antarctic Treaty System to define the Antarctic area.

Despite some disagreements and different interpretations, we just came too into the waters of the Southern Ocean as it is defined by the International Hydrographic Organisation, the southernmost of the World’s Oceans, south of 60° S latitude and surrounding Antarctica.

Antarctic waters that welcome us at the end of the day with a defined and clear edge of the Weddell Sea pack ice.

We have been sailing on a good course and speed pretty close to it during the whole day, just about out of sight. But when it is almost nightfall, foggy and with plummeting temperatures, first it becomes visible in the radar, then from out on decks at just a couple of cables away due to the very reduced visibility.

Engines start once more, hands are called on deck to strike sail. First Courses, then Royals followed by the whole stack of Squares. For the moment we tighten the staysail sheets, but not for long. Soon they are pulled down too.

The night goes on in a combination of motoring and motorsailing under staysails, following the limit of the ice under the foggy conditions, now turning north around ice-tongues, now resuming our course to the Southwest.