All Forums  Catalina/Capri 25/250 Sailor's Forums  General Sailing Forum  Rounding Cape Horn

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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 UserName: Password: Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: * HTML is OFF * Forum Code is ON Smilies [quote][i]Originally posted by Voyager[/i] [br]There are actually three different channels at the end of the world, coincidentally I got a few YouTubes this week on the subject. • The Straights of Magellan is/are a channel between the Tierra del Fuego and the Argentina/Chile mainland with strong tidal currents and sea ice in Southern Hemisphere winter and spring. Fog is a major problem there, and the channel is narrow in a few spots. Especially now with the rainfall shortage in the Panama Canal Zone, some shipping has opted for this passage. • The Beagle Channel, named for Charles Darwin’s boat, is a passage between the rocky island of the region, and the channel is shallower and narrower that the Magellan straights. Current opposite winds over the shallow bottom can create overfalls and standing waves here. • But the real butt kicker is Drake Passage, named for Sir Francis Drake, who was Queen Elizabeth I’s privateer. If you can imagine the entire Southern Ocean being driven by the unobstructed winds circling the globe in the roaring forties, with their huge amount of “fetch” across 25,000 miles of open ocean. Now take those waves and currents and focus them into a 500 mile wide channel between the southern tip of South America and the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, and you’ve got the ingredients for the “washing machine” Now remember that most circumnavigating single-hand sailors must pass through the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn, so it’s no wonder that many boats capsize in these conditions. Some, unfortunately, are dismasted or disabled worse. [/quote]   Check here to include your profile signature. Check here to subscribe to this topic.