ROCK HARD

Rounding the Horn – Being a story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives – a deck’s eye view of Cape Horn’. So reads the front cover of Dallas Murphy’s book of the same name. Settling in for a good long read of this work is a pleasure a sailor doesn’t come across every day. Murphy signs aboard one of Skip Novak’s yachts, Pelagic, under Captain Hamish Laird and his mate Kate Ford to cruise south from the Beagle Channel. He is a journalist and a novelist, so you’d expect his account to be well written, but this remark, as bland as a school report, does not begin to do him justice.

The construction of the book, its widely varying content and the descriptions of personal experience are a rare class act. Meticulously researched historical references are blended with hands-on accounts of present-day action in these remote seas. We join Dallas and his shipmates soon after dark, bound from Puerto Williams towards the archipelago of the Horn.

The haze that had materialised with full dark suddenly lifted – maybe it had never been there at all, another atmospheric trick. The taut