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Osvaldo E. Escobar Torres

Osvaldo, born in 1976, is Chilean. He joined the Chilean Navy at the age of 15 and has been in constant contact with the sea ever since. For eight years he was on duty in the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego at various naval stations, working, among other assignments, as lighthouse keeper and radio operator on famous Cape Horn.

After leaving the Navy, he spent two years backpacking through South America and then studied tourism in Punta Arenas, Patagonia, Chile. Osvaldo earned his degree first as a boatswain, then as co-skipper and finally as skipper on the famous sailing yacht Santa María in the region of Cape Horn and Antarctic. Having acquired all the necessary Chilean captain's certificates in the Navy, he also became a RYA Yachtmaster in England in 2003. In 2007 he founded the company Polarwind Segelreisen & Expeditionen in Germany. Various sailing expeditions took him from the Mediterranean Sea to Spitzbergen in the following years.

In 2010, he and his wife fulfilled their dream of owning their own yacht. Together with their son Theo, who was one year old at the time, they took the SY POLARWIND from Greece to Chile, where Osvaldo then started organizing and leading sailing trips and expeditions around Cape Horn.

Osvaldo sailed around Cape Horn a total of almost 110 times and accompanied numerous Antarctic expeditions. In 2017, the family of four now, moved back on board completely. In three years they sailed from Antarctica, through the Pacific, (Easter Island, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea), the Indian Ocean (Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka) and the Red Sea back to the Mediterranean, where they finished their circumnavigation in 2020.

Osvaldo writes for various sailing magazines in Europe and South America. He has been a member of the Chilean section of the Cape Horniers since 2002 and is still the only Chilean to lead sailing trips and expeditions in the Cape Horn area.