Cape Horn has been called the maritime equivalent of Mount Everest.

Located at the southern-most tip of South America, the notoriously problematic patch of ocean is infamous for its huge swells and wild waves. Like its high-altitude equivalent, many intrepid adventurers have heard the siren song of such a challenge and set out to test their mettle. Comparatively few, though, have tamed the beast.

The cape has claimed many vessels — and lives — throughout the ages, and shipwrecks dot the otherwise pristine landscape there in morbid proof, like memorial markers on a stretch of the world’s most remote, scenic highway.

The Argo, however, is not among them.

It was in that 88-foot, custom-built Outer Reef motoryacht that Bainbridge Island’s own Paul Hawran and Andrew Ulitsky rounded the horn in February, thus realizing a 1,400-nautical-mile dream nearly a decade in the making.

The trip was an abiding passion, Ulitsky said, for Hawran, his wife Helen’s brother, the boat’s owner, in particular, but one he quickly came to share.

“Long-planned,” he said.

“[For] Paul, especially. I’ve known Paul, I’ve known Helen, for 50-some years. We’ve grown up together, and he’s always had the dream of having the big boat, and then within the last 10 years he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get to Cape Horn. That’s the dream, that’s the ultimate.’”

Though not exactly a modest vessel (24-feet at the beam, with three state rooms), the Argo quickly came to look pretty small amid such tremendous natural wonders — glaciers, mountains and giant rocks and shoals — as are frequent obstacles at the bottom of the world, Ulitsky said.

“There are 800 shipwrecks down at the cape attesting to how rough those waters can be,” he said. “If you get on that latitude, the 60th latitude, there’s nothing around the entire globe to break the water, so you have the Pacific and the Atlantic meeting right there.”

As Hawran described it to Northwest Yachting Magazine, in a recent article detailing the men’s voyage, the boat, “was built specifically for stability, endurance, and performance with an efficient displacement speed providing a range of approximately 2,500 nautical miles and a top end speed of 15 to 16 knots depending on local currents. In terms of running in an open ocean in desolate areas of the world, Argo was built with redundancies: twin engines, twin gensets, twin anchors and windlasses, three life rafts, as well as electronic backups to the backups.”

It all came in more than handy over the course of the three-month trial.

Hawran and another friend set out from Puerto Vallarta in Mexico in November 2016, having docked the boat there to wait out the worst of hurricane season, Ulitsky said. He met them in Valparaíso, Chile to begin the journey proper. Down the coast they went, weaving in and out of inlets and bays, between islands, as they could, avoiding the worst of the open ocean — when possible, that is.

Sometimes, though, it was pretty rough going.

“Three days, three nights running with 12-foot [high] seas separated by seven, eight seconds,” Ulitsky recalled. “There’s just nothing you can do when the boat pounds like that. You can’t sleep. You can’t walk. You can’t eat. You can’t read.”

They saw only one other motoryacht during the entire trip, and at times, Ulitsky said, even he began to question whether the rough was worth the reward.

Things eventually settled, though, as they moved ever further south, not exactly trucking but neither could they dawdle, as the men were all too aware of the very tight window of time they’d have to traverse around the horn, given the spot’s unpredictable weather.

“We tried to average about eight to 10 hours a day,” Ulitsky said. “That’s about 10 knots an hour.”

“It wasn’t like they were totally carefree,” explained Helen Ulitsky of her brother and husband’s sailing pace. “They had to get down to Cape Horn within the time zoned to go around it. There’s only a very short window you have to go around there safely weather-wise.”

“There are people who have gotten stuck there for a month and never gotten around,” Andrew agreed.

By March, he said, that part of the Earth is experiencing the start of winter — and that’s no time to be on the water.

Helen was unable to accompany the men on the trip, though she kept in semi-regular contact, as possible, and tracked their progress from Bainbridge.

“I don’t know if it was Andy’s dream as much as it was my brother’s,” Helen said of the sojourn. “My brother was in finance and owned his own company and this is what he dreamt, and Andy, when my brother asked him, Andy went, ‘All right, I’ll go.’ Because he was afraid of leaving me because it’s three months and it’s a long time, but he went because he knew it was so important to my brother, who worked 24 hours a day for all those years to have this.”

Andrew said it was definitely a case of opposites attracting on board. Though longtime friends, and having undertaken lengthy sailing outings together before, he said they both quickly fell into their respective roles: Hawran being the mission-oriented captain, and he more of a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of guy.

“Paul was definitely the destination guy,” Andrew said. “I’m more the journey guy. So, for him this [place] was his goal. For me it’s, ‘Eh, if we make it, that’s fine.’”

“I think [Paul] realized that along the way,” he added. “Stopping at some of these places and taking him to [a local’s] house for dinner, he was like, ‘Wow!’

Having talked to both men, though, Helen said they clearly learned from each other. As they drew closer to the cape, her husband, she recalled, started to share her brother’s drive.

“Andy all along said, ‘I don’t care if I go around the cape,’” she said. “When he got down there, he’d learned from Paul and Paul learned from him.”

The difficulty of the trip, she added, was the point from the start, for her brother at least.

“It had to be more than going to the Caribbean,” she said. “He wanted to prove himself to himself. I don’t think he cared about anybody else.”

Both Hawran and Andrew count the stops along the way as the highlights of the once-in-a-lifetime journey.

“The whole thing was just a wonderful trip,” Andrew said. “The people in Chile were just outstanding; very warm, welcoming, hospitable, patient.

“The people were wonderful. The country was beautiful.”