All Women Crew of INSV Tarini Cross Cape Horn Through Drake Passage

The expedition, ‘Navika Sagar Parikrama’, is being led by skipper Lt Cdr Vartika Joshi and five naval officers who will return in April 2018.

The Indian Navy’s first all-women crew of Indian Naval Sailing Vessel (INSV) Tarini has rounded the Cape Horn through the Drake Passage on January 19. The closest land of Antarctica lies 600 miles South across roughest stretch on planet known which is known as Drake Passage. As tweeted by the Navy’s spokesperson, “Winds are strong gusting to 70kmph with rough sea state and the distance to Port Stanley is 410Nm. The crew of the vessel hoisted the Indian flag as they crossed Cape Horn.




The expedition, ‘Navika Sagar Parikrama’, is being led by skipper Lt Cdr Vartika Joshi, who is from Rishikesh. She is accompanied by equally accomplished officers, Lt Cdr Pratibha Jamwal from Kullu, Lt Cdr Swathi P. from Visakhapatnam, Lt Aishwarya Boddapati from Hyderabad, Lt Vijaya Devi from Manipur and Lt Payal Gupta from Dehradun.

The six-member team wrote back to FORCE while sailing from Australia to New Zealand and remarked that “the journey has been a mix of adventure, monotony, thrill, surprises, and boredom. We have been lucky to embark on this journey where we could encounter certain phenomena like bioluminescence and the Aurora Australis, which a landlubber can’t even imagine in dreams.”

The vessel will return to Goa in April 2018 and the expedition is being covered in five legs.