Marco and Hugh- Southern ocean battle continues with light winds and iceberg sightings

Yesterday a brief email from Cessna some 50 miles to our port (to the north of us) brought home the reality of our current position on the planet. They had just spotted two icebergs, Antarctica is just over 1000 miles to the south of us and although we are out of dense iceberg territory a few bergs survive long into the summer and drift north towards our current position which was confirmed by recent satellite imagery. We are keeping a constant radar lookout and visually inspect the horizon regularly. So far luckily I can only report an amazing setting of the moon during the night which lit beneath the layer of clouds with an incredible
amber glow followed by a remarkable sunrise with spectacular colours in a very crisp morning.

Less than 1200 miles to Cape Horn and we are still facing very unusual and calm conditions, we haven’t seen winds above 10 knots for a few days now and we have been flying our light winds sails typically reserved for the doldrums rather than the high latitudes, so much so that before the restart in Wellington we had considered swapping our upwind code zero for another running sail, luckily we didn’t as it would have been a disaster, the weather has been difficult to read, very often the actual conditions we meet differ from the forecast and it is a bit of a lottery as to what we should expect, I don’t even know if it is an advantage to be south of Cessna, we could gain or we could lose but we are pressing on hoping for another lucky break…

Posted by: firstclass