Back at the Helm
Sailing the Yaghan to
Antarctica, Patagonia and the South Pacifc
Arne and Heléne Mårtensson
Translated by Katarina Sjöwall Trodden
Copyright © 2009 Arne and Heléne Mårtensson
Original title: Vid nytt roder
Translation: Katarina Sjöwall Trodden
Photographs: © Arne and Heléne Mårtensson
Cover photo: Chris Lewis Photography, Arne and Heléne Mårtensson
Cover design: Jesper Skoog
Maps: Björn Bäckman, Sture Söderlund
ISBN 978-91-633-7046-5
E-boksproduktion | Publit 2010
Contents
Preface
1. Love of the Sea versus Power (Arne)
A Careerist Steps Down
Cape Horn 1994–1995
Heléne – The Love of My Life
Our Plans Begin to Take Shape
Media Interest
The Second Greatest Challenge of My Life
2. Sailing, the Sea, Marathons and Love (Heléne)
3. Planning Our Route (Arne)
In the Wake of James Cook
A Distance Equalling “Two Laps” around the World
Pirates
The Website Explodes!
Hasse Nilsson and the Explorer
4. Going with the Wind (Arne)
The SPOS
Trade Winds
Hurricanes and Global Warming
El Niño
Our Weather Criteria and Two Years of Analyzing the Southern Ocean
5. Choosing Boat Type and Equipment (Arne)
The Impossibility of Combining Cost-efficiency, Speed and Comfort
Running Costs Are Ten Per Cent of the Boat's Value
Throw Your Prejudices Overboard
Three Years’ Experience of our Hallberg-Rassy 46
All Important Functions Doubled
6. To the Canary Islands (Heléne)
When the Lilacs Bloom We Will Be Far Away
Luxury Restaurants in Rotterdam, Arriving at La Coruña in the Fog and Capsizing with Our Dinghy off Lagos
Sunbathing and Swimming in the Canary Islands, but We Are Longing for the Atlantic!
7. Crossing the Atlantic to Brazil (Arne)
Preparing to Leave Puerto Mogán
The Debby Tropical Storm
The Atlantic Ocean
The Doldrums
South-Easterly Trade Winds and the Equator
Salvador de Bahia
The Abrolhos – “Open Your Eyes”
Angra dos Reis
Circumnavigating the World in the Yaghan – Now on Television!
Ihla da Cotia
Pirates and Sea Captains
Ihlabela
8. Continuing South (Heléne)
Punta del Este – We Want to Stay Here!
Mar del Plata – the Buenos Aires Customs
The Falklands – Albatrosses and Penguins
Ushuaia – City of Our Hearts
9. Antarctica (Arne)
Ushuaia – A Meeting Point for Circumnavigators
Puerto Williams
Drake Passage
Spending Christmas Eve in the Melchior Islands
Spending New Year's Eve at Port Lockroy and Blocking Ice at 65 Degrees South
Turning Back to the Melchior Islands
Stormy Weather in Drake Passage
10. The Chilean Channels (Arne)
The Last Tango for Argentina
Charts and Cruising Guides
Summer Temperatures around the Glaciers
Constant Reports to the Armada de Chile
The Strait of Magellan Lives Up to Its Bad Reputation
Pringle Stokes Committed Suicide in Port Famine
The “Perfect” Storm
Patagonia Mooring – Seven Ropes to Shore
Fuelling at Puerto Natales
You Don't Know a Thing About Foul Weather until You Have Sailed in Patagonia
Yaghan's Plaque at Caleta Connor
Patagonia Ends at the Bay of Pain
Warmer Weather and Built-up Areas
Isla Chiloe
Chile – a Light on a Dark Continent
11. The Pacific (Heléne)
To Polynesia via Robinson Crusoe Island
The Days Come and Go
The Tuamoto Islands
French Polynesia
The Ultimate Paradise Island – Suwarrow
The Kingdom of Tonga – Land of the Humpbacked Whale
Paradise Islands
Visit from Home
12. Fiji and New Zealand (Arne)
The Land is Owned by the Indigenous People
Savusavu
Denarau
Mamanuca and Musket Cove
Back on Denarau
Yasawa Island Resort
Sailing to New Zealand
Shooting Yaghan from the Air
Auckland
Getting the Boat Serviced at Orams
Ashore in Auckland
13. Home Again and then Back to Auckland (Arne)
Participating in a TV Show about Our Future Plans
Spending Christmas and the New Year with Our Family
Three Shake Down Cruises in Auckland
Preface
We circumnavigated the globe in the Yaghan between 2006 and 2009. We chose the long way round. Starting in Sweden we continued down to South-America, Antarctica and Patagonia and then up to the South Pacific. After a stopover in New Zealand our voyage continued along the coast of Australia, round the southern point of Africa to the West Indies and back to Sweden. We travelled a distance of 44,000 nautical miles, following in the wake of James Cook's first scientific expedition of 1768–1771, the only exception being that Cook never went as far as Antarctica.
Ever since Slocum's first circumnavigation in a leisure boat over a hundred years ago, people have sailed around the world in many types of craft. Many have done it in a small boat the hard way.
We consider ourselves to belong to another, growing, community of circumnavigators. We are a couple in love, between the ages of fifty and sixty, who are sailing a relatively large boat.
We were not looking for hardship; we wanted to complete a pleasant, memorable, safe and comfortable circumnavigation of the world.
We are not interested in sailing with a crew, however. We like to sail on our own. We cannot imagine having other people on board, apart from our grown up children who visited us a couple of times.
This gives our voyage to New Zealand via Antarctica, Patagonia and the South Pacific a slightly different angle.
We have written half the book each, which means that each chapter is signed by either one or the other. We write from different perspectives, which we believe will add something to our story.
Readers are also able to follow our circumnavigation through twenty film sequences, subtitled in English, that can be viewed on www.youtube.com by entering “arne and helene martenson” in the search field. The two and a half-hour footage has previously been shown on DiTV, the television arm of the leading Swedish business daily Dagens Industri.
Heléne and Arne
≈
Love of the Sea versus Power
(Arne)
A Careerist Steps Down
What induces a person to step down from seven of the most prestigious corporate boards in Sweden in order to circumnavigate the world for three years with his wife, which also means leaving a five-hundred
-square-metre home and replacing it with one that is only thirty square metres?
I have always been a careerist.
At upper-secondary school in Vänersborg I was chairman of the student council and of the conservative students’ association. I went on to become vice chairman of the conservative youth association when Per Unckel was one of the two chairs; the other was Georg Danell. I began my studies at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1970. I was chairman of the student union between 1972 and 1973 at the same time as I studied full time. I graduated – as always – with top grades. When the conservatives won the election of 1976, after forty-four years of Social Democratic rule, I was offered a number of government jobs. Everyone I knew who was offered similar positions accepted them. It was a difficult choice; I had worked at Handelsbanken for several years and I was happy there. After careful consideration I decided to give up politics and start a career in banking. There were many who thought I was mad to make such a decision. To most people, working for the new government was extremely attractive. It was perhaps my first, but not my last, step away from a career that had been staked out for me.
Soon afterwards I was appointed vice president. I was only twenty-five. At the age of twenty-seven I became the youngest member ever of a management board of one of the eight regional units of Handelsbanken. At the age of thirty-eight I was appointed managing director and CEO. I remember reading Ulf Lundell's Jack and thinking, “I never did those silly things when I was young”. Maybe I had missed out on something … I worked very hard and I was given a lot of responsibility from an early age, but I never regretted launching my career at the bank instead of in politics.
Perhaps the fact that I did have so much responsibility from a young age is a contributing reason to why I decided to leave it all behind in order to circumnavigate the world.
I was managing director of Handelsbanken for ten years and member of the board for five.
The news that we were about to circumnavigate the world was made public in September 2006; we were very apprehensive about how it would be received. We had lived with the dream for a long time, it was not exactly news to our friends, but, because of my many commitments, a lot of people probably thought it would never happen. In addition to being chairman of Handelsbanken I was vice chairman of Ericsson as well as on the boards of Sandvik, Skanska, Holmen, Industrivärlden and Vin & Sprit. Many would sacrifice their right arm for these posts.
The response to the news was a lot more positive than we had anticipated. As it turned out, almost everyone could appreciate that even a person such as I can have a strong, although unusual, desire of, for example, circumnavigating the world – and still be respected for it. A minority – mostly financial journalists – failed to understand how anyone could possibly be prepared to leave these commitments of their own free will. They argued that there had to be some kind of conflict or power struggle behind the decision. This is hardly surprising since much of the financial reporting in the media concerns power.
I have always sailed. The boat that was to take us round the world was my tenth. I got my first sailing boat when I was six. When I was a boy, my father ran a number of businesses in Vänersborg. One of them was a chandlery. This is why I was interested in boats from an early age. Sailing has been my greatest hobby from the age of six.
For many years I focused on racing, but in the summer I would spend several weeks sailing among the islands off the Swedish coast.
Cape Horn 1994–1995
I did not become seriously interested in cruise sailing until I rounded Cape Horn at New Year 1995. We were a group of friends who had signed on as a paying crew in Ushuaia, Argentina, and spent a few weeks sailing down to Cape Horn, which we rounded on New Year's Day 1995. With me on board were Hasse Olsson, editor-in-chief of the financial daily Dagens Industri, Hannu Olkinuora of Kauppalehti, the corresponding Finnish paper, and Björn Karlin, managing director of a foundation that promotes stocks and shares.
Cape Horn has attracted navigators for hundreds of years. Ever since Magellan discovered a passage round South America, the Strait of Magellan, and later Cape Horn, have been strategically important, and all the major powers spent four hundred years fighting for control in the area. At the end of the 19th century there were approximately ten thousand ocean-going ships in the world. Many of them occasionally rounded Cape Horn. It was a kind of examination for sailors. After you had done it you had nothing more to prove. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave steam ships a competitive advantage, and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 marked the end of the sailing era around Cape Horn. The only ship owner to continue on a large scale was Gustav Eriksson from the island of Åland in the Baltic. The legendary ship owner continued almost up until the beginning of the Second World War, but after that it was definitely all over. Cape Horn lost its importance as part of a trade route, but it continued to attract the sailing community. Cape Horn is the Mount Everest of people who sail.
In order to be able to say that you have rounded the Horn in the correct way you need to start from latitude fifty degrees south in the Atlantic and end at fifty degrees south in the Pacific, or vice versa. This is impossible to do in a chartered boat from Ushuaia. Ushuaia is situated on fifty-four degrees south and Cape Horn at fifty-six degrees south. The fifty degrees south latitude in the Atlantic is found immediately north of the Falklands, and in the Pacific roughly off Puerto Eden. You cannot claim to have rounded the Horn in a chartered boat from Ushuaia in accordance with these rules, but, nevertheless, it was an emotional moment for us all.
As we rounded the Horn Björn Karlin wrote a short poem, which became our emblem. It was written in fire before our eyes every time Heléne and I were thinking of our circumnavigation:
Cast away
Leave your hopeless bay
Be reborn
Round Cape Horn
During New Year's night on Cape Horn we all talked widely and loudly about our lives that would never be the same again after this unique experience. My friends had no idea how right they were in my case. One year later, Heléne and I moved in together, and we were married in March 1996. It was a difficult time; our relationship received a lot of attention in the media and among those for whom life has no meaning unless they can gossip about the affairs of others.
Heléne – the Love of My Life
I had owned an old Stratus for about fifteen years when Heléne and I began to sail together. We soon realized that we loved spending time together at sea. We were happier at sea than anywhere else.
Heléne is the love of my life. She is and will always be the most beautiful, sexy, funny and brightest girl I have ever met. If it was not for her, I would never have circumnavigated the world. We have been in some strange places over the years, but I have never been bored in the company of this fantastic, fifty plus woman. I believe that a strong and loving relationship is the most important asset you can have if you are going to spend a long period at sea in someone's company.
The Stratus was a thirty-five foot sailing boat designed by Peter Norlin. I had both raced her and spent my holidays on her. I regularly participated in the annual Gotland Runt race and I normally spent five weeks of my holiday every year sailing. It was because of the racing that I kept the Stratus for so many years. The Stratus class was an interesting one-design class with many competent crews and tough competition. Racing is, and remains, the best way of developing your sailing skills. If you do not race, it is easy to believe that you are better than you are. It is the same in business; you need competition in order to develop. Everyone who sailed in the Stratus class had the absolute latest in sail technology, and we spent the boat's value on sails every two years in order to keep up. We usually got a lot of press since Carl Bildt always joined us on board during Gotland Runt – even when he was prime minister. During that period the security services used to tail us all the way round the track in their Storebro motor boat.
The Stratus is not suitable for cruise sailing, however, n
or for spending long periods at sea.
Our Plans Begin to Take Shape
In order to be able to sail long distances Heléne and I ordered a Hallberg-Rassy 46 in 1997. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to boats, there are no compromises. A boat that attempts to combine racing and cruise sailing is no good for either. You need to decide what you want to do with your boat. It was time to acquire a cruise sailing boat, without compromises.
We sailed to the Shetlands, the Faeroe Islands and other places with our Hallberg-Rassy 46, and we were soon hooked. We enjoyed exploring ports and harbours, but we also learned to make the most of three whole days at sea, now that we owned a boat that was made for doing just that. We were always happy at sea. Twenty-four hours of gale force winds and high seas en route to the Faeroes greatly increased our confidence in the boat. Sailing was problem-free and the boat was completely dry below deck when we arrived. We wanted a boat that could take more of a beating than the crew. And we can take a lot – we are both experienced marathon runners. (I have run twenty-five marathons and Heléne eighteen.) It upsets me to see a poorly designed boat. The fact that three out of seven boats (forty-three per cent) were having serious problems during the first twenty-four hours of the Volvo Ocean Race of 2005/2006 is an example of warning.
When we got our Hallberg-Rassy 46 we thought it was a large boat, but we soon learned that it is possible for two people to sail even larger boats with the help of modern technology. There were distinct advantages to having a larger boat in terms of comfort and speed. That is why we ordered a Hallberg-Rassy 62 in May 2000. We had already decided that we would realize our dream of circumnavigating the world – we were definitely going to do it. This meant that the 62 model had to be constructed with a future circumnavigation in mind. Once we had signed the contract we began to spend money on our voyage. All that could stop us now was death or serious illness. From that day, we were determined that our dream would one day come true.
At the time, 2006 seemed to be a realistic year to set off. In 2006 I would be retiring from my job as managing director of Handelsbanken in accordance with the contract I signed in 1991. I was only thirty-nine at the time, so my retirement age was set to fifty-five, which was no secret. The fact that I would retire in 2006 had been stated in the annual report for over ten years. And yet I was not entirely sure that I would be able to leave then. I had spent my entire working life at Handelsbanken. I was extremely loyal to the bank and to the people who worked there. Because of this, things might happen that would force us to defer our plans. We also had to consider the risk that one of us would fall ill or in some other way become unfit for going through with such a tough project. When you turn fifty, you do not automatically assume that you will remain healthy.
Back at the helm - sailing the Yaghan to Antarctica, Patagonia and the South Pacific Page 1