Using socat to make a secure tcp connection to an irc server

Recently, I got into irc, so I installed sic and started - obviously - chatting.

But, it turns out that sic doesn't provide any security features like SSL or TCP so I in man sic, they told to use socat to establish a secure TCP connection so I installed it and read the documentary.

In the example section, I found this: socat TCP-LISTEN:www TCP:www.domain.org:www So I just ran socat tcp-listen:6667,fork tcp:irc.freenode.net:6697 and tried to connect with it using sic -h 127.0.1 -p 6667 which puked out: sic: remote host closed connection with socat not complaining.

I tried it again with the option -d -d for socat being more verbose:

2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1889] N accepting connection from AF=2 
127.0.0.1:38664 on AF=2 127.0.0.1:6667
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1889] N forked off child process 1897
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1889] N listening on AF=2 0.0.0.0:6667
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N opening connection to AF=2 
185.30.166.37:6697
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N successfully connected from local 
address AF=2 192.168.178.28:42822
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N starting data transfer loop with FDs 
[6,6] and [5,5]
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] W read(5, 0x558eefca3710, 8192): 
Connection reset by peer
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N socket 2 to socket 1 is in error
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N socket 2 (fd 5) is at EOF
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N socket 1 (fd 6) is at EOF
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N socket 2 (fd 5) is at EOF
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1897] N exiting with status 0
2019/01/02 00:38:38 socat[1889] N childdied(): handling signal 17