REAL LIFE ‘There were a lot of troubles, but we never gave in’
ack in 1987, Pequod was the first privately owned Argentine sailboat to reach Antarctica. Her owner-skipper, Hernán Alvarez Forn, wrote Antarktikos, in which he recounted the nautical feat.
As a journalist and a sailor he was better known as Hormiga Negra (Black Ant). A well-known columnist and editor of yachting magazines, writer of nautical books and with copious nautical miles, he circumnavigated the globe more than eight times.
In 2018 I was looking to buy my first sailboat. Around the same time I was reading Antarktikos, which stoked my dreams of sailing to remote and pristine places like Antarctica. It seemed like fate, therefore, when I saw an ad for Pequod on the internet.
I didn’t hesitate for a second and started on the adventure of restoring her to her former splendour as a first-class ocean-sailing vessel. I made plans to return to Antarctica from Buenos Aires, but this time on a self-sustaining sailboat with zero carbon emissions.
was my first sailing boat. I had sailed as child on the Rio de la
