Growing seas, increasing winds, and squalls crossing our path.  

Seasickness starts to strike, some of the watches get thinner as the ship rolls, swell breaks over the bulwarks and water washes the decks. Although we reduce sail for a few hours, the ship speeds up to an average of 8kn over the last day. A proper welcome to the 40ºS Latitude, the Roaring 40’s.  

But once we crossed this latitudinal line, things eased down. Today it was just the entrance to the 40ºS that seemed to be guarded by heightened swells, strong blows, and showers. Later on, falling closer to the center of a relatively Low Pressure System traveling on the same path, the wind becomes a breeze, the night is clear under the full moon, the seas abate and we can start setting more canvas “running our easting down”.  

Traditionally, trading ships of the 18-hundreds running along the Southern Ocean around the world between the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, were sailing to the Roaring 40s and their associated strong westerlies that made for a good swift passage. A route that came to be known as the Clipper Way. The balance between speed and cargo capacity was the goal of these mid-19th-century merchant sailing vessels. 

Running the Easting Down, they sailed before the wind and big seas at those latitudes of the Roaring 40s. But along the way, there is the obstacle of the higher latitude of the southern tip of South America. Here the ships had to make it over the 56ºS of the Horn to find the Atlantic waters. Latitudes well known as the Furious 50’s where usually the winds are stronger and the temperatures colder, with the added hazard in the past of coming across drifting icebergs on their way. The ice menace, nowadays much more rare at the Horn latitudes, where now very sporadically ships come across dangerous ice. 

Those Eastward-bound ships usually didn’t spend long near Cape Horn as they didn’t have to battle against seas and winds. The route in the opposite direction, from the Atlantic to the Pacific was, and still is, a whole other story. 

The conditions of such a legendary passage can always present a surprise. We talk about the narrowest bit of ocean between the southernmost tip of the Americas and the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, the wide-open Southern Ocean, where weather systems and currents flow eastwards around the planet without finding any land obstruction, is forced to press through the six hundred miles of the Drake Passage. Low pressure systems compress and pile up, resulting in often raging and quickly shifting winds. The seas build up around the shallows close to the Horn. 

The introduction of marine steam engines into the commercial circuit represented the ending of the clipper route. However if nowadays you want to sail around the world, its name, history, and characteristics come back to our minds, it still remains as the fastest sailing way.