Sailing Magazine
by Richard Crockett
Most of us will have at some point in our lives read about Shackleton and ‘Endurance’?
In this feature Skip Novak describes an attempt to retrace Shackleton’s voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia. His opening paragraphs read as follows:
“The last 36 hours had been heavy going. The Southern Ocean storm had carved its path just above the 60th parallel. With increasing winds from the north-east topping out at over 60 knots the breaking seas came on board regularly.
“Hove-to the group of five on ‘Pelagic’ were riding reasonably well. Late that afternoon the wind abated slightly and then the southerly shift came on strong, and with it the cold. This change in wind direction made the seas dangerously irregular – even for our 54 feet. In the middle of the night we were laid flat on our beam end, but righted quickly, everything below in disarray and nerves a bit shattered. Normally, with the shift I would have been running with the sea, but we couldn’t as we had a job to do, our fortunes metaphorically tied up to a 23 foot could-moulded boat with five men aboard, somewhere about eight miles to the south. The ‘Tom Crean’ had last been seen over 48 hours before, in moderate conditions, but already bobbing around like a cork.
“At 08h00 on that morning of 25 January first mate Elena Caputo took the message from Paddy, the skipper of the ‘Tom Crean’, that they had rolled over three times in the early hours of the morning. Our thoughts were with them. Late that afternoon they made a major decision based on a life threatening situation.”
READ MORE HERE: Pages from 1997 08 – SA Yachting – OCR
