Read about sailing all your life and you won’t find another book quite like Bound for Cape Horn, with its interesting subtitle Skills for Expedition Cruising. Any suggestion this might be yet another text book on how to do it is dissipated in the opening pages. R J Rubadeau is a one-off. The reader is soon treated to proper, seamanlike literature about why a man might seek out trusted comrades and sail from Maine in a Morris Bermuda 51, south to the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal and on down the west coast of South America to Cape Horn. A sentence lifted from the early chapters gives the flavour: “On the edge of the abyss is where a lot of the good stuff seems to happen in the lessons learned department.”
In spite of the light-hearted style of the prose, it’s clear the voyage is meticulously planned. In the extract here Rubadeau and his old shipmates are finally sailing through the last of the South American archipelago to the Horn itself. After the recent chamber of horrors served up by the weatherman, things seem to be on the up and he looks to have sent them a day
