Children of Cape Horn

Rosie and Colin Swale were the first people to sail around Cape Horn in a catamaran in 1973. "Children of the Horn" by Rosie Swale is the fascinating story of their journey. Rosie's powerful account is so exciting I could not put the book down. Their 18-month voyage started on December 1971 in Gibraltar, Spain in Anneliese, their 30-ft catamaran, with their two-year-old daughter and six-month-old son and ended in Plymouth England in July 1973. With little money and a lot of courage they sailed 30,000 miles via Panama, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand and South America. Experts called their route around the treacherous Cape Horn suicidal. Rosie's description of their punishing seven weeks in the loneliest, emptiest, coldest, windiest Southern Ocean near Cape Horn is riveting. She writes, "Queues of vicious squalls lined to get us...it was miserably cold. All our oil skins were beginning to leak. The howling west wind sent sleet and freezing rain whirling from Antarctica...the cockpit was continually full of hailstones. Standing outside to hand-steer the boat was painful after one hour; unbearable after two." The enormous 40 to 60-foot waves Near Beauchene Island were in front of them. She says, "We were compelled to look at them...Then Colin and I clung to each other and the boat as we saw coming toward us a massive pointed black wave which seemed twice as high as Anneliese's mast. She stood up on the stern ends to meet it, and then slowly began to climb over. Just as she reached the top, a tabular freak wave standing on the foaming shoulders of the one we had just climbed appeared above us...Colin crushed me between him and the door trying to hold me as it crashed over." Rosie completed another record breaking 4,800-mile solo sail in 70 days across the Atlantic in a small 14 ft cutter in 1983. She married sailor/ photographer Clive Pope after her divorce. When Clive died of prostrate cancer in 2002 Rosie ran around the world to raise money for two charities. She wrote a book about her experiences entitled, "Just a Little Run Around the World: 5 Years, 3 Packs of Wolves and 53 Pairs of Shoes" which was released in early 2009.

This book is charming, a bold adventure with two babies aboard a 30' catamarn sailed by an unassuming couple getting their feet wet for the first time. Europe to Australia and back by way of Cape Horn. A pleasure to read.

This book was written by an honest and perhaps naive young woman and mother of two babies who with her husband sailed off on a true adventure as a family. Set in the early seventies, they left Gibraltar and sailed across the Atlantic ocean, the Caribbean, the vast Pacific Ocean to Australia and back to England through the Southern Ocean and around Cape Horn. With two babies on board their 30 foot catamaran. The reader is taken along for the ride and shares their love, respect and awe of the Ocean. They may have started out perhaps a bit naive, but the reader can cetainly see how the family grows and learns together and share their adventures, joy, fears, illness, and much happiness. It is a happy book.