Given that the maritime industry is steeped in traditions what’s more special for a mariner to do it for the 1st time?
- Rounding Cape of Good Hope
- Traversing Suez Canal
- Traversing Panama Canal
- Northeast/Northwest passage
- Drake Passage
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Crew off on time.
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I think the answer to this question depends on how long a person had sailed before doing any of them. I was 24 when I first crossed the Atlantic as CE (CE OSV/DDE Unltd) which is not on your list but it was a big deal for me. When I went through the Panama Canal for the 1st time as 1AE I didn’t even go on deck or take a picture. I’ve done 3 of the 5 mentioned & the one I have the most respect for is The Drake. It’s easy to go through a canal but to have seas coming from one direction, the wind ripping from another & the swell from the 3rd is undescribable. They call it the Roaring 40’s for a reason, hats off to anyone sailing around The Drake or below 50S.
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I mean I also didn’t put crossing the equator on it as apparently the Navy has/had a separate shellback ceremony for that, at least for a while
With global commercial routes, that is probably a lot less special nowadays anyway.
Haven’t heard much about the Northern passages, but I did hear the Drake passage can be absolutely brutal and most prefer the Magellan Strait if possible. Kudos for traversing it.
For real sailors (ie square rigged sail) a gentleman could dine with one elbow on the table (otherwise considered quite rude) having rounded one of the three southernmost capes (Cape Horn, Cape of Good Hope and the southern capes of Tasmania), two elbows on the table having rounded two, and his feet on the table having done all three ie unsurpassable bragging rights.
Purists added the condition that the square rigger must be carrying cargo, but ships in recent times have tried with a bale of wool or a barrel of grog, but not met the most stringent entry requirements to this exclusive (and diminishing) Cape Horners club.
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THX for indicating the only true and valid benchmark.
addendum :
Fore those interested in seeing square rigger passing Cape Horn there is a link below.
Rem: they took the easier route from west to east. The opposite route is a much different and more challenging ballgame.
Viewers caution : suggest to mute the sound as foreign language sounds may cause dementia tremens to those not used to clicking and chirping sounds.
Clip title is : Cape Horn - round the world trip of Gift of Yuth training vsl
(2156) Przylądek Horn - rejs dookoła świata Daru Młodzieży - YouTube
The square rigged sailing ship was under the command of the fellow who did the show in Sydney in below clip:
Clip title : Sydney bridge passing under sails.
Legendarne przejście Daru Młodzieży pod pełnymi żaglami pod mostem w Sydney w 1988
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With an estimated 800 shipwrecks & a reputation of claiming the lives of ten thousands sailors it’s pretty obvious why it’s diminishing with other options available.
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Here’s the best video of a Cape Horner (Peking) in a full gale from the masthead. They sailed both ways around the cape carrying cargo from Chile to Europe.
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Peking had a sister Passat and I was honored to befriend a Personality intimately associated with this last cargo carring square rigger.
The Person I am talking about was no other but famous and well known Niels Jannasch.
[Niels Jannasch | Maritime Museum of the Atlantic]
(Niels Jannasch | Maritime Museum of the Atlantic)
He was a frequent Pax on one of the 4 sister ships pictured below:
Niels was a close friend of the custodian of the Maritime Museum in Gdansk and frequently sailed as honorable guest/pax on all of above pictured con -ro vsls.
He spent hours on my watch 04-08/16-20 talking about his fascinating trips on the last windjammer , the stories which i listened to with my mouth agape.
The other reason he kept coming on my watch was, that i was the only devoted listener o/b to VOA broadcasts in special english and BBC world service so He could be updated nd we could talk politics with fresh input.
He as far as I rememebr was also a Dean Of the History of Navigation faculty.
On my last round trip to ECUSA He invited me to farewell dinner in Halifax during which we talked for hours . I remember this event very well as two things happened there:
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I was so moved by his farewell gifts, that I left the restaurant with my dinner cloth napkin/serviette still tucked under my belt .
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He gave me two books pictured below:
Niels instinctively knew, that with these two items He would set me on two parallel voyages of discovery, which I would surely not resist.
R.I.P. my good Friend Niels Jannasch
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Mine was the Antarctic Circle -
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Had a time racing her on CGC Eagle from Hobart to Sydney…of course the wind did not cooperate and we withdrew (I think unilaterally?) to make our arrival commitment in Sydney.
She is a beautiful ship! Great people, too. Tipped a few cold ones with her crew.
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I am VERY thankful for my time in Eagle…and even pulled a couple months as a reservist there in '92. Fun.
Fast forward to the 21st Century, and I had the pleasure of piloting Concordia and Europa (different seasons) when they were in the Lakes.
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Same
@jbtam99 @texastanker
What was that crossing like?
That must have been January 1988. My good ship Young Endeavour won that race by being the best ship upwind in light conditions. We never won a reaching or running race against the big square riggers.
Australia Day on 26 January (our bi-centenary) was the most impressive day of sailing ships on Sydney Harbour I’ve ever seen. Wall to wall sailing ships, pleasure craft (scantily clad in many cases) as Young Endeavour (flying her newly hoisted Australian White Ensign) led the parade of sail followed by fireworks that night from the Harbour Bridge. Happy times. An event of international good will.
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Well, for us the trip south was pretty uneventful, but then, we were a fully laden tanker so we were pretty stable anyway. The ice limits were an issue that year (2003) too which made for calmer conditions as we got further south. The ice was so bad that we couldn’t even get to the ice pier at McMurdo and they had to stretch the airfield hoses about two miles to us for the discharge.
Going back to Brisbane in ballast was a little more sporty, but to me was no worse than the Gulf of Mexico when the cold fronts start whipping in. Definitely preferable to say the Gulf of Alaska in winter.
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Trip down was not bad, was on the USCGC Glacier for Deep Freeze 80 - round bottom and very tender. Tad uncomfortable in the southern ocean - but I was young and it was not that bad. Leaving we got creamed just off Cape Adare - 30 plus seas, 80 plus knots of wind. We lost the Landing Craft we carried - ripped out of its Davits. A very bad night.
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I’ve been through both canals. And it was nice to check them off the list. But they required no special effort or skill. Well, one transit of the Panama Canal did, but that’s a whole other story.
The rite of passage where I work is surviving your first lethal storm. Defined as a storm where you know if you lose propulsion you’ve got a 50/50 chance of dying.
In my memory it seems like a lot of the 1980s I was stuck on a 200’ boat in the North Pacific surrounded by 40-foot seas, hove-to for three days at a time in 60 to 100 knot winds. Bow on to the seas. Pinned like a butterfly to a board. No real sleep, because you had to wedge yourself in your bunk. No hot food other than the microwave could offer.
This would happen several times a winter. After the 3rd or 4th time it became routine. And therefore more dangerous than the first time. But I remember the first such storm when I was a mate, being gobsmacked that anything made by man could survive the pounding we were taking. While the captain and chief accepted the suffering as no more than a minor toothache.
That first time was the first time in my young life I had to confront mortality. Or as my Vietnam war veteran buddy aboard would put it, “Ain’t nothing easier than dying.” The main going out at the wrong moment. Losing a rudder. Wouldn’t take much.
As proof, this first time there was a fishing boat about a 100 miles away also being knocked to shit. The skipper put out a mayday that his boat was breaking up. In those days all business was conducted over SSB. Everyone in Alaska could hear the USCG and stricken vessel talk back and forth. I was listening closely as our boat got knocked on her beam ends hour after hour and the deck was buried again and again.
If it were the movies we would have gone to the fishing boats rescue. In real life we couldn’t go anywhere. We could barely keep the boat hove-to bow-on, the bow burying in 40-footers.
So we spent a couple of hours listening to the fishing boat skipper calmly detailing to the USCG the losing battle with flooding, and how his boat was done for, and giving names and phone numbers of his crew, so the families could be contacted and told they were all dead.
And me on watch in our wheelhouse pretty sure we were next, and making a mental note that if it was my turn to give the USCG a list of the soon to be departed to keep my voice as ice cold as that skipper’s voice was.
The rest of the story: by the time the water was around those guys’ ankles the wind began to relent, and the USCG managed to get a copter to them and pull them off. Boat sank of course. When the seas dropped below 20 feet our vessel got underway again. No medals. No fanfare. That was the lesson. Your reward was going back to work. Nothing more.
That first lethal storm was special.
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