Hints and tips:
...“When they were building these Explora vessels, Pierfrancesco Vago contacted me and said: listen Mike, we need an ambassador. I said you must be crazy, I hate these vessels!” Horn tells me....
...Rounding Cape Horn in what are known as “the Furious Fifties”, a helpless, scurvy-ridden crew sear their palms and fingers as they clutch for their lives at wet rope, wet yards, wet shrouds, the wet steering...
...Top of the range is the Oro version, which is packaged in a vessel reminiscent of an inkwell....
...Despite the broken spinnaker pole in the southern Pacific, she was first round Cape Horn and then got a huge morale boost as she sailed past the Falklands and all her friends in Stanley motored out to wave...
...For the next 48 hours we head south across the notorious Drake Passage, the body of water between South America’s Cape Horn, Chile and the South Shetland islands of Antarctica, which is considered one of...
...They came from shipwrecks washed up by the treacherous Cape Horn waters, or from vessels dismantled in Valparaíso, one of the last great ports of the Age of Sail; though the provenance of most is shrouded...
...Hapag-Lloyd does not intend to divert any more of its container ships around the Cape of Good Hope but AP Moller-Maersk is considering whether to send some of the 15 vessels it diverted around Africa back...
...She considers them to be vessels for spirits, ancestors and stories. “Part of the magic of figural sculpture is that it’s similar to the toys and dolls we have when we’re growing up,” she says....
...For a premium, travellers can add flights to leapfrog the Drake Passage, a notoriously rough two-day stretch of ocean between Antarctica and South America’s Cape Horn....
...Next day, on the Drake Passage, the 800km stretch of water between Cape Horn and the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, even the crew are not spared: “I find it — challenging,” says one of the smiling receptionists...
...Once everyone was on board, the RMS headed north-east to Buttermilk Point, before turning around and passing by James Bay for a final honking of the horn....
...There’s folklore too, with tales of mermen and chatty mermaids with huge breasts, and sea monsters such as the Kraken or hafgufa, with horns as big as ship’s masts....
...foundation, estimated that in 2011, at the height of the Somali pirate epidemic, the cost to the maritime industry ran to $3.2bn a year in extra insurance costs and $2.95bn in rerouting ships around the Cape...
...“But we are not talking about Somalia or the Horn of Africa, where pirates actively chased vessels down, taking control and taking hostages. This is more akin to armed robbery or petty crime....
...Horn....
...Of the vessels involved in the 3,926 incidents, 364 had been robbed twice and 73 had been robbed three times!...
...to Brazil, then to Uruguay, Argentina and around Cape Horn to Chile....
...The Montecristo, bound from Liverpool to Vietnam, was attacked 620 miles off the Horn of Africa on Monday morning. Two Italian vessels hijacked earlier this year remain held by pirates....
...Container ships that are not entering the Gulf can avoid the area on the Asia to Europe route by sailing round the Cape of Good Hope....
...The vessel, which is too large to use the Suez Canal, was heading for the Cape of Good Hope rather than into the waters near Somalia where the threat of pirate attacks has traditionally been greatest....
...by One Earth Future, a Colorado-based governance foundation, estimated that piracy cost the maritime industry up to $3.2bn annually in extra insurance and another $2.95bn to reroute some ships round the Cape...
...The largest single component in the study’s estimate of piracy costs related to the cost of diverting ships to sail round the Cape of Good Hope to avoid the most dangerous waters around Somalia....
...There is little time: you have to bring it down to the right temperature and pack it and get it to the vessel,” Mr Horn says. “Chrome, by contrast, is not as time-sensitive.”...
...In 2009 the average ransom of a Somali-hijacked vessel was $2m....
...That makes it the second largest vessel seized by pirates following the Sirius Star, seized in November 2008 on its way to the Cape of Good Hope....
International Edition