“The high whistle of the wind through the halyards, and above all the pale blue illimitable sky, cold and serene, made me deeply afraid and conscious of my insignificance. / Far below, the ship was an impressive sight. For a time the whole of the after deck would disappear, hatches, winches, everything, as the solid water hit it, and then like an animal pulled down by the hounds, she would rise and shake them from her, would come lifting out of the sea with her scuppers pouring.”

So wrote Eric Newby in “The Last Grain Race” during his passage to the Horn when sailing from Australia to England in 1939 with a cargo of grain and square sails overhead. His epic tale of life before the foremast in the last days of sail is but one thread of the myth of the south, woven by generations of hardy mariners getting blown off their feet in the Furious Fifties.

Instead I am presented with the Fickle Fifties, totally becalmed and spinning listlessly on an oily sea totally bereft of a ripple of wind, to say nothing of spindrift and storm tossed peaks.  We currently have everything on board stacked as far forward as we can get it in order to push the bow down and help lift the draggy stern out of the water. We are very gently shooshing along upwind with Code 0 and just a gentle tinkling ripple down the side of the boat tells me we are still moving. I had expected to be stacking everything in the back of the boat lest we trip over the bows while surfing the raging seas but its not to be, this time.

Its frustrating to have worked for years to get here on a racing boat, all the time hoping to satisfy my curious thirst for the ultimate thrill ride only to come up against the evil triple zero. 0.00 knots of boat speed. It would like making a pilgrimage to Monte Carlo to play dice on the highest tables in Europe only to roll snake eyes all night long unrelenting green felt of the Craps table.

Aboard Cessna Citation, our lives continue as normal with 3 hour watches. If we are lucky enough to have a few moments of stable wind from the right direction we can put on the automatic pilot and watch the bubbles pass serenely in the inspection windows in the hull. However, the bubbles soon stop and the siren song of the pilot alarm breaks the reverie and we are called again to stupidly hang onto the tiller as the boat wallows listlessly. Normally after 3 hours on watch one is glad for the break after been pummelled and abused by the ocean, but here one needs a break lest one go mad from being impotently powerless to make headway.

In this sense our conditions are worse than the fearsome doldrums because of the overbearing calms. The doldrums are a battleground of competing weather zones and with patience and strategy (go south!) there is always a goal ahead and a cloud to chase. Here we don’t have the luxury of an approaching squall line because the air is squeaky clean and silently still, the only sound is the wrenching mainsheet and the ringing in your ears. I’m as yet unsure of whether its better to edge along the side of the ridge to the south or whether to plow on toward the east as the system moves on. In fact, its easy, because such choice is illusory and currently we have no more choice as to our own course as we do over where, and whether, the wind blows.

Whenever a teenager responds to “where have you been?” with “oh, nowhere” he must have been my neighbor because I am now in the middle of no where. The dead center of zip, the capital of nada.
 
The pacific ocean is the largest open expanse on earth and we are now close to the middle of it at point Nemo, named after Jules Verne’s reclusive captain Nemo in “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”. In front, Chile at 1.700 nautical miles east, behind, the Chatham islands at 2,200 miles. To the north lies Pitcairn islands at 1,600  to the south a icy headland of Antarctica at 1,300 miles. We are so far away from land right now that flight commander Dan Burbank and his five crew on the International Space Station are closer to solid ground right now that we are!
 
For all the talk of the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, we are currently tootling along at 8 knots in light breezes and sunshine and the remaining miles to Cape Horn are forecast to be reasonably pleasant. We are trying desperately not to be caught by a ridge of high pressure that has been chasing us otherwise we’ll grind to a halt.
 
The approach to the Bluqube scoring gate was another story entirely as Adrian and I were finally able to crack off from the tight angles we had been sailing and make tracks under spinnaker. As the wind built we shifted from the big “Citation” spinnaker to the smaller, tougher “Caravan” high wind spinnaker. Hunkered down in truck mode, it was fantastic to have Cessna back up to cruising speed if only for a few position reports. I saw that we would have a few more hours of favourable wind than Marco and Hugo on Financial Crisis, so with coffee in hand I pulled some long hours on the helm to help push home our advantage.
 
For that invested effort we have now got our interest back as they have now been caught by the chasing ridge and the elastic that connects us continues to stretch. If it continues to do so is now down to whether we can secure some solid wind and make tracks somewhere, from the capital of nowhere.

We have just tacked onto starboard after a long dive south into a zone that our race director says has a relative concentration of ice bergs. We may have tacked too early as the shifting winds still swing like a metronome instead of the promised steady breeze promised by the forecasts. Trimmed on hard for sailing upwind, our boat searches the correct course through the gathering fog like a snuffling greyhound, never tiring or complaining of condensing fog droplets the way a real helmsman would.

I climbed the rig today, for the fourth time this leg. I went aloft this time to re-tie a humble elastic cord that pulls the lazy backstay against the mast and stops it from swinging perilously around the front side of the spreaders. In the heat of a maneuver, one could very easily winch hard on a caught backstay and break off a spreader or otherwise damage the rigging. In the same way that a hundred million dollar space shuttle was scuttled by a 50 cent rubber washer, the loss of a humble bungee could cut our ambitions short.

While a calm day for the fabled southern ocean, I dared not linger at the masthead except to take the obligatory photo and check wind instruments. A few days ago, while still racing close with BSL and Campaign de France in 30+ knots of wind, I again scaled the mast to re-rove the staysail halyard that had broken at first light. In order to stay competitive, we didn’t reduce sail, other than by default, but bore away to reduce slamming and pitching. Even so, for the culmulative hour that I was there, feeding down a weighted mouse line and lashing the end of the new halyard I suffered considerably. With my arms looped around the top spreaders while waiting for Adrian, the bow slammed into a wave, sending me flying with only my forearm against the spreader to stop me from being lost in space like a moonwalking astronaut. Several similar incidents left me grateful that I regained the deck
with all bones intact, but over the interveining days the bruises have flowered into a multi-coloured array from blue to ochre red.

In the cold grey light of our surrounding fog, such actions smack of foolhardiness rather than the heroics of the moment, but its all part of racing a boat in big conditions when each mile won or lost is breathlessly measured at each position report. Its for this that I’m disappointed to have lost two of our competitors. I sadly understand that the Fields were hurt and needed to receive medical attention, but conditions were not such that a solid boat with healthy crew could not have carried on. A yacht race is different to a cruise in the same way that a jazz group differs from a set orchestra. In an orchestra one has a scored itinerary to follow, a schedule to keep. The jazz group still gets from A to B by way of semi-quavers but does so with a flow of its own imagining, each twist a wholy unique experience.

We’ve lost the tenor sax and trumpet of our ensemble and have so lost the shrill notes of the most rigorous competition. Now its time for our three piece band to womble off into the mists, because “Baby, I’ve got the Blues”

View from the top of Cessna Citation's mast -- middle of South Pacific © Conrad Colman

Adrian Kuttel at the helm of Cessna Citation © Conrad Colman

Ahhh, New Zealand! Finally! Land of the Long White Cloud. The Maori legend of the settling of New Zealand is that paddlers in a huge canoe from Polynesia saw on the distant horizon a long white cloud, and underneath lay the promised land, a rich bounty of never-before-seen wildlife that were quickly made into dinner, and subsequently extinct.

So goes the legend anyway. On our arrival we’ve had a huge wind hole as a welcoming party with crazy wind shifts and maddening calms. Thankfully we’re not the first to find these islands, otherwise they woud be known for all generations to come as “land of light and variable, with spotted cumulus”. Not quite so catchy as the original.

Despite the setbacks Sam and I are in fine form, thanking the New Zealand customs and immigration office for giving us an excuse to mow down the snack bags in our remaining stores. “Anything you’d like to declare, mate?”" BURP, nope! She’ll be right!”