August 27, 2008
54°52.2'S 68°27.4'W
Caleta Cucharita, Beagle Channel, Argentina
WINTER CRUISING IN THE BEAGLE CHANNEL
We have spent the last few weeks cruising the Argentinean coast of
We left Ushuaia on a beautiful morning, absolutely dead calm, clear and cold, with temperatures in the low 20s. We rolled out of bed when our alarms went off at 8:00 and it was still quite dark. We had had wanted to get an early start because we were heading west, against the prevailing winds in this part of the world, and the forecast called for calm conditions until mid-morning, when a 20-25 knot westerly wind was supposed to begin blowing. By the time we had eaten breakfast and were pulling up the anchor, the rising sun had painted the sky to the north in rich, rosy red hues and frosted the snow-covered mountaintops on the south shore of the Beagle with pink. The heavy frost had turned our non-skid decks into sure-skid, so we moved carefully, our breath climbing the cold air in long white plumes. The deck wash hose was frozen somewhere between the seacock and the deck fitting, but little mud came up with the anchor. We have learned to have a kettle of water on the boil in the galley in case we have to open a frozen deck locker or get a frozen line off a cleat, but that morning we didn’t have to use it. We passed between the point that protects the harbor to the south and the islands that bisect the Beagle to the west of that point and turned east. By the time we were out in the Beagle, able to see all the way to the glaciers on the 7,000 to 8,000-foot high peaks some sixty miles distant, the snow on the mountaintops glowed orange, gold and red from the rising sun.
We had dressed for the cold – I was wearing two layers of thermal underwear and a windproof fleece jacket – and we had both been a bit too warm while we were working on deck, pulling up the anchor and bringing the dinghy on board. But once underway and no longer active, the cold quickly penetrated. We had our “bus heater” – a marinized heater plumbed into the engine cooling system – running full bore. It is located just below the companionway, and its heat rises into the hard dodger. That made the top of the companionway a very attractive place to be on such a chilly morning.
In the winter, the scenery in the Beagle is reduced to a narrow palette of grays. Gone are the green leaves of the deciduous Antarctic beech trees that climb the mountains to a uniform height of 800 meters and the tough, honey-colored grasses that cover the boggy areas at their feet during the rest of the year. Instead the bare, gray branches of the twisted beech trees offer the only contrast to the white snow that blankets the mountains – except in the protracted period when the sun is finding its way over the high peaks or sinking down behind them. Then the clouds in the sky turn to delicate pink feathers or billowing explosions of gold and red, and a range of colors wash across the mountains – pink, purple, orange, gold. We were treated to a dazzling show as the sun climbed higher in the sky and we motored along through the dead calm water.
As forecast, the wind started to build as we were approaching our anchorage a few hours later, blowing down out of the glaciers and snow-covered mountain peaks. The freezer-cold gusts brought tears to our eyes when we ventured out from under the shelter of the hard dodger. As we approached our anchorage – a sheltered cove protected at its mouth by two small islets in an Argentinean national park called Lapataia (Lap-a-tie-a) – we were pleased to see that it was dead calm inside, the water reflecting the majestic mountains all around. It was only as we entered the harbor that we realized that the water we were seeing wasn’t calm – it was frozen in a layer so clear and perfect it could have been glass. Hawk’s bow broke through the half-inch of ice with a crunch, and then a rumbling, grumbling sound as her sides carved a channel of open water. We motored in about a hundred yards and dropped the anchor through the ice. When we went down below to light the heater and eat a big breakfast, I kept mistaking the sound of Hawk breaking the ice as she swung to her anchor for the roaring of a gale.
Overnight the wind shifted and built, causing the ice to clatter around Hawk’s side as it got broken up and chased from the bay. The next day we woke to an inch or so of snow, and the snow continued to accumulate for most of the day. At times the snow swirled gently from the sky like autumn leaves, each flake visible as a separate entity, and at other times the wind picked it up and drove it horizontally in an impenetrable curtain of white. The thick clouds and swirling snow rendered our world in shades of gray, one of those hauntingly beautiful winter days that only occur when the snow comes down in big, flat flakes and all sounds are muffled by the thick powder.
We have reached the doldrums of the winter, and have once or twice felt that February-time certainty that spring will never come. Yet each day gets noticeably longer, and once in a while a warm breeze blows through, causing us to sniff expectantly for the smell of soil and new leaves. It is almost time to waken from our winter hibernation and to leave the Beagle to rendezvous with the penguins and the elephant seals returning with the spring to breed in the Falklands and South Georgia.
From the far south, where winter still reigns,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
August 15, 2008
Ushuaia, Argentina
July 5, 2008
54°56.1'S 67°37.1'W
Puerto Williams, Beagle Channel
Isla Navarino, Chile
Hola!
Ask anyone down here, and they’ll tell you it’s all but impossible to get anything shipped internationally to Ushuaia. Parts shipped to Argentina disappear in the dark expanses of Customs warehouses for weeks or months on end, and sometimes never emerge again. Chilean officials keep much better track of things, but are less willing than Argentina to allow ‘yachts in transit’ to import parts duty-free, so customs must often be paid to get a package released from Santiago. From there, bulky items are sent by air freight to Punta Arenas and then physically transferred by someone to the ferry that comes to Puerto Williams.
So who would be crazy enough to try to get three 100+pound (50+kg) anchors to a yacht in the Beagle channel?
It’s a bit of a long story. It starts in Puerto Montt back in November when we sent our Bruce anchor in to be re-galvanized and the galvanizer somehow or other broke it. We hadn’t thought that was even possible, but when the Bruce was delivered back to us it had a deep crack all the way around the base of the shank. We carry a backup anchor for just such a situation – a 55-pound Delta – and we would have been comfortable using that almost anywhere in the world. But not cruising the Chilean channels where an anchor has to be able to set on rocky, kelp-covered bottoms and hold in gale- and storm-force winds.
The original Bruce is no longer made, a victim of less expensive knock-offs and poor anchor test reviews. We contacted several anchor manufacturers, but no one could figure out how to get us an anchor in the three weeks before we planned to head down the channels. With no other good alternative, we found a Chilean machine shop which made a quite good copy of the Manson Supreme anchor. We have been using that anchor since. But even before leaving Puerto Montt, we both wanted to figure out how to get a ‘genuine’ anchor, and so we asked Manson and ROCNA to continue to look into ways to get an anchor to us, and we figured out how to get payments to New Zealand.
Both companies are located in New Zealand, which should have been discouraging enough to stop the discussion. But to their credit, neither company gave up. We had met ROCNA’s inventor, Pete Smith, when we were in New Zealand, and even then he had been planning on sailing to Chile. Those plans finally came to fruition in January, and when he left New Zealand aboard his tough 50-foot aluminum cutter Kiwi Roa, a 50kg ROCNA with Hawk’s name on it was stowed securely aboard. When Pete arrived in Puerto Montt in February, he passed the anchor along to Betty and Luis, friends of ours on a 35-foot Van de Stadt Falcon, Ave del Mar, that we met in the Gambier Island in August of last year. The ROCNA got dubbed “Rocky” and rode down the channels lashed to a heavy stanchion near the stern of the boat, giving Ave del Mar a bit of a list until Betty and Luis emptied a water tank on that side. They arrived in Puerto Williams two weeks ago, just a few days before we made the 30-mile run down the Beagle from Ushuaia. After more than five months and 6,000 sea miles, Rocky now sits happily on Hawk’s bow waiting for the opportunity to do what he was made to do.
Manson also came through for us. Despite our repeated warnings of the difficulties and challenges of shipping anything to Puerto Williams, they made it happen. When we arrived here, not one but two anchors were waiting for us, stowed in an abandoned fish factory by a friend who runs the local express mail office. They had been there since April after a record ten-day run from New Zealand to Puerto Williams. One anchor was a 50kg Bruce look-alike called the Manson Ray. The other was their 55kg Manson Supreme. When we got those back to the boat, we weighed and measured all of the anchors in preparation for a major anchor test, a battle of the titans for the heavyweight championship of the world.
A few days ago, we held the first round of the championship bout, taking all three anchors ashore at low tide on an ugly rocky beach that also happened to be frozen. Betty and Luis from Ave del Mar helped out, with Evans and Luis manhandling the anchors on the beach while Betty and I worked the windlass on Hawk’s bow. We hadn’t really expected to be able to get any of the anchors to set in what to our mind was a very difficult bottom – a layer of tennis- to soccer-ball sized rocks over pea-sized gravel and frozen sand. But to our surprise, all three anchors set and held 1,000 pounds of pressure, though there were differences in how quickly they started to engage the bottom and how long it took them to set.
We plan to do some real world anchor testing when we leave her for a two-month winter cruise of the Beagle. This will be the first time in our cruising career that we’ll be actively looking for the very worst anchorages with the very poorest holding. We have always carried over-sized anchors and they’ve always seemed to suit Hawk, but even she is looking a bit weighed down with more than 350 pounds of galvanized steel stowed on her foredeck.
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
June 19, 2008
54°48'S 68°18'W
Aboard Hawk
Ushuaia, Beagle Channel
Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
The scenery here in the winter is simply magnificent on the good days, while conditions are terrible on the bad days. Most cruising is a series of wonderful emotional high's followed by horrible depressing lows, with hopefully the highs far outweighing the lows; Winter in the Beagle is this in spades - with higher highs and lower lows.
The two countries that form the boundaries of the Beagle - Chile and Argentina are quite a study in contrasts. Chile simply works, perhaps the best of any country in S. America. People arrive when they say they will, the mail arrives on schedule without the need to bribe customs, the officials are polite and helpful, etc. The people are a bit dour and Germanic, but extremely nice when you get to know them.
Argentina simply does not work - our cell phone will only connect internationally in about 1 call in 10, mail almost always gets lost, and getting packages thru customs is a Kafka-esque experience. Recently the local yacht club stated that they had authority to charge 'harbour dues' (and quite high at about $250/month for us) to all boats at anchor in the harbour whether they used the club facilities or not. We asked who had granted them this authority - perhaps the port captain, or the prefectura (harbour police) or the Armada (Navy), but no - the yacht club board had simply granted themselves the authority. We have made a counter suggestion that they consider a small fee for using their dinghy dock. This discussion has all been accompanied by the expressive Latin hand waving and loud voices.
May 15, 2008
54°49'S 68°18'W
Aboard Oyster 72, Billy Budd
Ushuaia, Beagle Channel
Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
It’s 8:00 in the morning and still pitch black outside. A couple inches of snow fell overnight. As it melts, it falls to the deck from the boom in wet sheets accompanied by heavy thumps. The sun will not rise for more than an hour, so until then we can’t see how much snow has accumulated ashore or how much whiter the mountains are than yesterday. We’re still a month away from mid-winter, and we’re down to a bit over eight hours of daylight officially. But with the high mountains that border the city of Ushuaia to the north of us, our effective hours of daylight are really only from about 10:00 until 4:30. We’ll lose another hour of light in just over a month on the shortest day of the year. In terms of daylight hours, wintering here in Ushuaia can be compared to wintering in Sitka, Alaska.
We returned ten days ago from a three-week whirlwind visit to the United States. We hardly have enough time to get over the cultural shock of being back in the US during such a short visit. Before we traveled extensively, we had thought that culture shocks were one way – that we would experience them in other cultures but not when returning to our own. In fact, we expect things to be different in different countries, so while we observe and generally enjoy each country’s idiosyncrasies, they rarely shock us. We accept what comes, and though we might wonder at why a country works (or not) the way it does, we are only surprised by the differences if we have very strong preconceptions about a country before we arrive. For us, the real shock comes when we return to our own country and see it in light of the other places we have visited. The very places we grew up in and know best seem alien and strange, not because they have changed that much, but because our perceptions and expectations have been changed by the places we have visited.
This first struck us when we were living in Sweden before we went sailing. Back in the late 1980s, Sweden was a very homogenous country, and the population was white and Northern European. The first time we returned to the States, we had seen nothing but white faces and Scandinavian body types – moderately tall, relatively thin – for more than six months. Upon disembarking at JFK airport, we were immediately surrounded by people of every conceivable color, shape and size. We hadn’t even left the airport before the diversity of our native country all but overwhelmed us.
Each time we travel back to the US, something else strikes us as particularly wonderful, odd or scary. No other country in the world offers the same level of customer service and convenience. Few other countries function as well when it comes to basic industrial infrastructure – roads, telecoms, power and water. We turn on a light switch and expect to get power; we open a tap and expect to get water; we log in on our computer and expect to access the Internet; we pick up the phone and expect to be able to place a call to anywhere in the world. We are virtually never disappointed in these expectations. In La Paz in Mexico, the water is only turned on four days a week as the aquifer that serves the city slowly fills with saltwater. In Playa del Coco in Costa Rica, the power was out about a third of the time we were there as the region’s growth outpaced its electrical infrastructure. Here ieredHn Argentina, the cell phone system is so overloaded that most incoming international calls do not get through. While our country must come to grips with many complex problems in everything from health care to education, as Americans we take it for granted that our country works at a basic level – a luxury the majority of people in the world will never know.
Such realizations make us feel blessed by what is considered normal in our country. But we are uncomfortable with other things that at least some Americans seem to take for granted. After 9/11, we were taken aback by the blind assumption America could invade anyone it pleased or change any government it disliked, an attitude implicit in many of the discussions we heard on (conservative and liberal) talk radio programs and even over the dinner table from before our invasion of Afghanistan until well after our invasion of Iraq. We have never heard similar discussions in any other country in the world. Only the US has the military wherewithal, the self-confidence – and the arrogance – to not only discuss “regime change” but to actually put it into practice. On another occasion when friends visited from Sweden, they were shocked to find out that there were children in the US who did not have access to the most basic health care, let alone sophisticated treatments for diseases like cancer. “But that’s barbaric!” our friends said.
On this last visit to the States, the thing that most struck us was much more mundane. We were shocked by how much time we had to spend in a car “running errands.” While shopping convenience has been brought close to the level of a science in the US, that does not extend to minimizing car travel time. Malls bring together lots of stores to make shopping a one-stop affair, but unlike in most of the rest of the world, most do not include the stores we need from day to day: grocery stores, dry cleaners, post offices, banks, hardware stores, liquor stores, office supply stores, and so on. These all seem to be located at some distance from one another, usually in suburban strip malls, requiring separate stops and a tremendous amount of wasted time driving, finding parking and going to and from the car. Over the course of three weeks in the States, we must have spent the equivalent of a 40-hour work week in a car going from store to store, running errands and tracking down things we needed to take back to the boat. Using public transit for these errands is not an option – where it is available at all it does not go to the places we need to reach. This is not a change from our previous visits, but with gas prices pushing $4 per gallon it struck us more forcibly than it ever had before.
When we lived in Europe, all of the stores we needed on a regular basis were located in a small neighborhood shopping area within walking distance of our apartment. This was similar to Main Street in the small town where my father grew up, a Main Street which has since succumbed to malls and mega-grocery stores outside of town. Everywhere we have visited by boat – except the US and, surprisingly, New Zealand – we have been able to do all the shopping and errands we needed to do on foot or using public transportation. Returning from the grocery store after a big shop, we often do use taxis, which are plentiful and inexpensive ($3-5 for a trip within town).
Living aboard a boat and sailing around the world stretches and challenges us, which is one of the main reasons why we continue to find it satisfying after more than a dozen years. In extreme moments – a storm at sea, a grounding in Iceland – we have been forced up against what we had thought were our absolute limits, and we have had to fight through those limits rather than giving in to them. Those moments have changed us forever. But other, major, changes come from the slow accretion of experience, the wearing away of our prejudices and preconceptions, and – in some cases – our most strongly held beliefs. Traveling does broaden understanding, but it also sharpens and deepens it. By knowing how things work elsewhere, we can envision more options and choices, we can dare to believe in different ways of doing things. The trick is bringing that back home with us again.
May you see with new eyes, if only for a little while,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
March 19, 2008
54°48.6'S 68°18.6'W
Ushuaia, Beagle Channel
Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Buenas tardes!
Hawk lies moored to a buoy in the horseshoe-shaped harbor in front of Ushuaia (pronounced oo-shwie-a). This colorful Argentinean town lies 30 miles to the east of Puerto Williams, on the north shore of the Beagle Channel, on the southern side of the large island called Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. Ferdinand Magellan named the island almost 400 years ago, in 1520, when he saw hundreds of bonfires along its northern shore shortly after his arrival in the Straits of Magellan. Those bonfires, made by the Selk’nam people, were likely signaling the arrival of strange vessels in tribal waters. The Yámana, another tribe on the south of the island no doubt saw and understood those messages which likely lessened the shock somewhat when European ships reached them a few decades later. They gave this harbor its name, a name which means “protected from the west.” The town’s many buildings, most painted in bright primary colors, sprawl along the foreshore beneath 4,500-foot craggy peaks sporting a few dwindling areas of glacier. As winter comes on, these peaks have begun to wear a mantle of white snow.
The season is changing here in the Beagle Channel. We’re well into fall, and the days have shortened to twelve hours from the fifteen hours of daylight we had when we reached this latitude a bit over a month ago. We no longer have the occasional day of temperatures into the 70s, and we’re starting to call days with temperatures in the mid-50s warm. The last of the cruising boats left in a herd a few days ago, some bound northward for a voyage up the channels and winter in Puerto Montt, the rest headed for the Atlantic and a return to the US or Europe. As far as we know, we’re the only crew planning to winter aboard a cruising boat in the Beagle this year, though a large flotilla of charter boats and a single private yacht and her crew remain in Ushuaia and Puerto Williams.
But I have to admit that we will not be spending the whole winter on Hawk. In fact, we spent most of last week babysitting the private yacht, an Oyster 72 for her crew, Clive and Laila, good friends of ours that we met on our first circumnavigation. While watching over the boat, we got to enjoy all the luxuries: hot showers, push button central heating, a washing machine, microwave, movies, ice cream from the freezer, all the water we could want… We will be pressed back into service when they take a longer vacation for six weeks in May and June.
We first met Clive and Laila at Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean when they were aboard Isa Lei, their 30-year old Van de Stadt Pioneer 30, one of the first European fiberglass production boats. We actually heard about them while on passage to Christmas Island when one of the Australian Coastwatch planes that checked our position daily told us that there was a “little boat” about a day ahead of us and gave us her name. Clive is Australian born and Brit educated; Laila is Danish born and has lived abroad since her early twenties. We are all of similar ages, and Laila and I share a love of horses and big dogs and look alike enough to be sisters. Clive and Evans share an ironic sense of humor and are able to commiserate about the “loneliness of command.” Over the course of shared landfalls from one end of the Indian Ocean to the other, we began to build what has proven to be a deep and enduring friendship. When we trace back the roots of our high latitude sailing to the seed that germinated into Hawk and this voyage, Clive and Laila stand center stage.
Fourteen years ago, all four of us were on Rodrigues Island after the boisterous run across the Southern Indian Ocean from Australia. We were all worrying about our next big challenge –passing under South Africa’s “Great Cape.” On Rodrigues Island, we met Ellard and his five crewmembers aboard Nicola, a 43-foot Roberts-designed steel cutter that Ellard had built himself with dreams of rounding the Horn. But after 34 days in Southern Ocean gales and storms between Cape Town and Rodrigues, he had completely abandoned any thoughts of Patagonia. Ellard was amused by our fears over rounding the Cape of Good Hope. “Let me show you a real Great Cape,” he said, giving Evans and Clive his copy of the South American Pilot for Cape Horn and the Chilean channels. This began a running joke about the four of us sailing around the Horn after we put this “little cape” behind us.
Over the following years, we went back ashore and built Hawk, and Clive and Laila built successful careers as charter skipper and first mate first on a 50-foot Moorings boat, then on a 62-foot charter boat. At the same time, they sold Isa Lei and started refitting a Gulfstar 43 they had named Amole. We saw each other as often as we could – they visited us twice in the States, and we sailed with them once in the Caribbean. By the time we returned to the Caribbean aboard Hawk in the fall of 1999 and were able to spend some time with Clive and Laila between their charters, our joke about Cape Horn and the Chilean channels had turned to commitment. But talking about it was too scary. Instead, the jokes continued with Evans proposing a race to Cape Horn, winner to buy the beers. Though it was unspoken, we all hoped that we might meet in the Beagle Channel and cruise in company on our own boats.
That was not to be. We came close, but we missed each other by a few months. Clive and Laila were on their way down the Atlantic to meet us in the Beagle in the summer of 2002/2003 when Clive’s father became ill. Clive and Laila spent the next three months dealing with him and his affairs. We could not wait, as we were leaving the Beagle bound for Australia on a two-month Southern Ocean passage which had to be done in the summertime. They arrived in the Beagle in April of 2003, three months after we had departed. Just as we had, they sailed north up the channels, spent a few months in Puerto Montt, and then sailed back south. With the offer of a new charter position running a 58-foot catamaran, they returned up the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
In the intervening years, we have completed our second circumnavigation, and they have moved from the charter trade to running the Oyster for a private owner. So it was luck – not planning – that had us arriving in Puerto Montt at the north of the channels within a week of one another back in October. We will be able to spend a good deal of time with them this winter, between trips with their owner and guests. Knowing Clive and Laila would be here made the idea of wintering in the Beagle irresistible.
As cruisers, we spend far too much time saying goodbye. We feel very fortunate that we’ve been blessed with such a vital and intimate friendship, and that we’ll be able to enjoy it to the full this winter.
May you find time for good friends,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
March 1, 2008
54°56.1'S 67°37.1'W
Puerto Williams, Beagle Channel
Isla Navarino, Chile
Buenas!
We have spent the last two weeks here in Puerto Williams, busy with the many activities that always occupy us upon reaching “civilization.” Puerto Williams consists of a half a dozen dirt roads set on a hill alongside the Beagle. Up until about a decade ago, no civilians lived in Puerto Williams, only Armada (Navy) personnel and their families. Today there is a thriving civilian settlement, and the population is about evenly divided between civilians and military personnel. This little town of 2,000 people with its dusty, one- or two-room houses would hardly be considered civilization anywhere else. Cows and horses wander around at will, homes and public buildings are heated with pot-bellied stoves, and the schoolyard is filled with hundreds of cords of firewood. But after spending two months without grocery stores, post offices, Internet cafés, laundry services or fuel docks, this feels like the big city to us.
Our home-away-from-home here in Puerto Williams is the ex-Micalvi, more properly known as the Club de Yates Micalvi, a grounded and partially flooded, rusted, barnacle-encrusted ex-ammunitions carrier which has served as the marina and clubhouse to visiting yachts since 1962. The raft of boats hanging off the Micalvi’s sides is ever-changing, and every few days there is a major shuffle when someone from the inside of one of the three rafts of four or five yachts decides it’s time to leave. Then we all have a merry old time running long lines this way and that, working the inside boat out with warps, pulling the raft back in against the Micalvi’s sides and tying everything up again all neat and tidy. No motoring into and out of a slip without bothering your neighbors! Like so many things in Puerto Williams, mooring to the Micalvi is not always convenient, but it can be quite exciting.
Since we arrived, we have taken on water, propane, gasoline and diesel. We’ve had our laundry done, and we have mailed packages internationally by express and regular mail. We have gotten one package delivered here from the States. These few things, which could all have been done in a couple of days in the States, have taken up most of the last two weeks. With the exception of taking on water, everything else involves a story and most took multiple days from start to finish. Our experience taking on diesel illustrates the complexities of life in Puerto Williams.
We arrived in Puerto Williams on Friday, February 15th with about 50 gallons of diesel left in our tanks – the lowest we’ve ever been aboard Hawk. When we were here last time, we were allowed to fuel right at the Micalvi. The gas station dispatched a tanker truck which had a hose long enough to reach us where we were rafted. Since then, they have changed the rules, and we have to go up against “Muelle Pratt – the wharf that lies in the Beagle Channel along the Puerto Williams waterfront used by the Armada’s gunships. Even at high tide, the top of the wharf is fifteen feet above the water, and the dock is festooned with huge tires that must come from mining trucks or earth moving equipment – they are at least 8 feet in diameter. On Monday, we went to the only gas station in Puerto Williams, located on the dirt road that runs along the waterfront, within sight of Muelle Pratt. We told the man who runs the station, Fernando, that we wanted 800 liters of diesel delivered on Thursday morning, weather permitting. He agreed, but he told us that we had to get permission from the Armada on Wednesday to use the dock on Thursday. He also told us that they do not accept credit cards, so we would need to get enough cash to pay for the fuel – close to $1,000.
On our way back to the boat, we stopped at the dock to look it over and concluded that there was no way we were going to be able to get Hawk secured without another person on the dock to catch our lines. We knew that our French friends, Sylvie and Sébastian, needed fuel. Their boat, Retombée de Sombrero, is a 31-foot stitch and glue boat that Sébastian built himself from plywood, epoxy and fiberglass, and she has faithfully carried Sébastian through the Southern Ocean under all five of the Great Southern Capes. Still, Sombrero was far too delicate to risk on the Armada dock. So Sébastian was glad to give us his jerry cans to fill and to catch our lines when we went to fuel.
On Wednesday, we arrived at the Port Captain’s office at a bit before 9:00. We were sent from there to the “Distrito” office for the Armada, and the receptionist called someone downstairs to speak with us. He had heavily accented Spanish and he spoke in a mumble, so we had a horrible time understanding him. We finally gathered that we should come back between noon and 2:30 to see if we had gotten permission. We had checked our money supply the night before, and now we headed to the only bank in Puerto Williams and its super-convenient ATM machine. We needed both of our debit cards to get enough money to pay for the fuel. When we returned to the Armada, we were told that we needed to talk to Manual, who manages the Micalvi, and that we would find him at the Micalvi. We hustled back to catch him before he left. He said it was fine with him, but we had to check with the Armada! Once we were fairly certain we actually did have permission to use the dock, we returned to the gas station to confirm that we were getting fuel the next morning, but it was closed for siesta. When we went back at around 3:00, Fernado was there. Yes, everything was arranged and he would meet us on the dock the following morning at 8:00. Manuel came back in the early evening with a diagram of the dock, and he showed Evans where we were to dock to take on fuel. The Armada wanted us on the north face of the dock, toward the Beagle, which would not be nice if the wind were coming from the northwest as forecast. Luckily, it was supposed to be very light, so we were hopeful that things wouldn’t get too dramatic.
Wednesday night, at around 10:30, a small Venezuelan boat pulled in alongside of us. We went on deck and explained that we were leaving first thing in the morning, and he said that was fine because he was leaving at 5:00 anyway to go around the Horn. But when we got up Thursday morning at 7:00, he was still there. We ate a quick breakfast and started to release our lines. Sébastian came over to help around 7:30, and I knocked on the boat next door to let them know we were off. The captain got up and untied his lines and motored out to let us go. Sébastian threw us our last spring line, and we maneuvered past the other rafts and headed for the Armada dock.
The wind was shifting around as we approached the dock, so it wasn’t clear how best to come up to it. As we got to the dock, it became apparent that the wind was going to be shifting from northwest to northeast, but it didn’t seem to be blowing at more than 10 knots. We probably could have just gone alongside, but we didn’t want to take any chances that the wind would build while we were fueling, pinning us beam on against the dock. In the end, we dropped the anchor to the north and backed down to the dock, ending up with 175 feet of chain out in 50 feet of water. Evans did two perfect throws, and Sebastian put the loops we had tied in the lines over two big bollards. We positioned ourselves about five feet off the huge pilings of the wharf, and were surprised at how much swell there was. It would have been very uncomfortable lying up against the stanchion-eating tires and hull-crunching pilings, especially with the change in the tide over the course of the two hours we were on the dock.
We were secured at exactly 8:00, and I thought we would soon see the yellow truck leave the COPEC station and make its way around the circuit to come to us. We could see the station from the boat, including the truck parked in the lot. Nothing was happening, which was disappointing because the Chileans have almost always been punctual. 8:30 came and went, and still no action at the gas station. Shortly after that, we decided we had to go find out what was going on. So we launched the dinghy (which we had left inflated and on deck just in case we needed it when fueling), put on the outboard, and Evans took Beth ashore before returning to the boat. Beth walked down to the COPEC station and found a man measuring the fuel in the underground tanks. “Estamos esperando al muelle para combustible” – “We’re waiting on the dock for fuel.” “Ja!” he said, which doesn’t mean yes so much as “Oh yeah!” He said they would come soon, so Beth hiked on back to the boat. Evans saw her coming and came around to meet her in the dinghy.
It took another half an hour for the truck to arrive, while we watched it leave the gas station and head up to the Armada to get final permission to go out on the dock. It was an anxious time because the wind had increased a bit from the northeast, right on our beam, and several times we had to take in chain to keep our windvane from bumping into the tires on the dock. We were relieved when the bright yellow truck finally rolled out onto the dock, turned and backed up with a loud beeping. Our friend, Fernando, was driving, and he apologized profusely and was horribly embarrassed at having forgotten about us. He put up several red cones, and then he handed us down the hose. It took another 45 minutes to fill our tanks and the dozen jerry jugs, and we took 780 liters or over 200 gallons. Fernando tossed us our lines, and by the time we got back to the Micalvi and got Hawk secured, it was after 11:00.
Fernando arrived in the fuel truck at about noon, and Beth took the money and left Evans hosing down the boat. At the gas station, Beth paid for the fuel and got a receipt, and then Fernando drove her back to the Micalvi. We had started on Monday morning, and it was now Thursday afternoon, and it had taken close to nine hours all told. Though tedious at times, the entire process had been uneventful. It felt really good to get the boat properly fueled up again and to take on enough in jerry cans that we’ll have plenty for the heater for the next few months.
Puerto Williams has allowed us to ease back into civilization, and we’re now ready for the big city. In the next few days, we’ll be heading across the Beagle to Ushuaia, the Argentinean city with a population of well over 100,000. There we’ll provision the boat and spend some time enjoying good restaurants, fast Internet connections, and the company of good friends.
Hasta luego!
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
February 16, 2008
54°56.1'S 67°37.1'W
Puerto Williams, Beagle Channel
Isla Navarino, Chile
Hola!
Hawk lies among the dozen yachts rafted three deep off the venerable ex-Micalvi, the sunken munitions carrier that serves as the Club de Yates in this settlement of 2,000 people on the south shore of the Beagle Channel. We arrived yesterday, 58 days and 1,333 nautical miles since our departure from Puerto Montt, after our third transit of the Chilean channels. We stopped at 26 anchorages on this trip, repeating only six from our two previous cruises (at 58 anchorages). Four of those were spectacular places we did not want to miss spending time in for a second or even a third time. There are so many anchorages we have still not visited along this convoluted coastline that we could probably transit the area another three times before we’d have to regularly repeat anchorages.
We have been in an anchorage with an entrance channel only twice the width of the boat and a football field in length, one totally surrounded by the high peaks of the Andes, one a freshwater lake several acres in size with water so pure we filled our tanks, one within sight of a glacier face… Pick any one of these and a dozen more and put them down in any other cruising ground in the world, and they would be the most spectacular anchorage in the area. But for us the most awesome, awe-inspiring place, one we have visited on all three of our passages through the channels, lies up a three-mile long gray-walled canyon of a fjord that appears to end in a rocky cul-de-sac and offer nothing in the way of protection.
Located almost exactly halfway between the western end of the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn, Seno Occasion extends into the westernmost tip of the 150-mile long peninsula on the southern end of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. That there is a protected cove amidst these glacier-ground rock walls is a miracle of sorts. Caleta Brecknock lies between two rocky points that jut out off the western side of the fjord, creating a tiny notch the width of three marina slips and about half again the length of our boat. There Hawk lies within half a boat length of shore on three sides, with two lines off her bow and two off her stern, tied to the twisted beech trees that have managed to grow to twenty feet or so in height.
The only way to truly appreciate the majesty of this landscape is from above. Glacier-scraped, rain-scoured and wind-swept, the land’s rocky gray bones lie exposed, rising in jutting shoulders and humpbacked spines to scrape against the low-hanging clouds. Water courses down gullies and ravines, tracing white plumes across the wrinkled elephant-hide of the landscape. An overhanging lake, trapped in a basin of impermeable rock like a puddle on top of a boulder, spills a waterfall a hundred feet into the rock-walled basin at the fjord’s head. The vegetation huddling in the few hollows protected from the relentless wind produces only a yellow-green softening of that gunmetal gray world of rock, water and sky.
For us, Caleta Brecknock is the frontier. To the east lies the Beagle Channel with its gunboats and charter boats, Armada stations and radio chatter, planes and settlements. To the north lies Chilean Patagonia, a thousand miles of coastline with only one settlement, thousands of anchorages and dozens of glaciers. We have always found a few pieces of garbage along the shores around the anchorages to the east, toward the Beagle. But when we arrived in Caleta Brecknock in the first week of February, we had not seen a single piece of garbage since the end of December, when we were still north of the Golfo de Penas in the “civilized” waters near Chiloe.
This land has never known the hand of man, never been molded to his purposes, shaped to feed him or cloth him or shelter him. It is wild and raw and untamable in a way no other place we have ever spent time in is. It reminds us that so many landscapes we regard as natural – the great plains of the western United States, the Pacific islands, the Outer Hebrides in Scotland – have all been shaped by man’s needs and desires for thousands of years. We can have no way of knowing what those places would look like had homo sapiens never made an appearance. But here, the land is truly untouched, shaped only by the formidable forces of nature.
An entry from Beth’s journal from when we visited Brecknock in November of 2002 attempts to describe something of what Brecknock means to us, what wild places do for us:
“Nowhere is the work of the elements on the land, the constant battle between land and sea, more in evidence than here. Nowhere else have I ever felt the devastating power of a raindrop to flatten vegetation and tear away soil or the mind-numbing effect of eons of gale force winds stripping bare the ragged edge of a continent to its very bones. I still hum with the feeling of joy I had there, climbing from ridge to ridge in this gray and alien landscape, sloshing in the puddles, wandering over the layers of rock jostled together in upthrusts or tumbled in mini-avalanches. I can still see the huge boulders dropped on the edge of cliffs and the great scored lines etched in the rock face by some retreating glacier thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.
I don’t know why I love this place so much or why I need so much these signs of nature’s blind and indifferent march toward her own, unknown and unknowable, conclusion. I suppose these eternal forces give me hope that our upstart species can not really change the balance, or that if we do we will be the ones to suffer and other species will still carry on. For it’s not just life that I feel here, but the very animateness of the rocks, the breathing of the water, the sense that even without its flora and fauna this planet would still somehow be. In this place more than any other, I feel the power of the living planet, life not in biological terms but in geophysical ones, life as a never-ending process of birth and growth and maturity and death and rebirth. In this sense, the stars are alive and their respective planets, whether or not they have ever hosted a bacteria or a protozoa…”
Just two days after we left Brecknock, we had one of those culture shock experiences that confirmed for us that we were no longer in the wilds of Patagonia. That day, we came down by the glaciers that line the north shore of the Beagle including the most spectacular, Italia. It just happened that when we were passing Italia, a cruise ship was going by in the opposite direction. The rails on all the decks were six deep with people, and more people were standing on stairs and what looked to be benches. It was a big ship and probably held more than 1,000 people, and all of them were taking pictures and video of us in front of the glacier. I could see flash bulbs going off all over the place. It was really weird to know that we were now going to be part of all those strangers’ vacations. I bet dozens of pictures of Hawk in front of the Italia glacier got posted on the Internet that day.
Now we are back to “civilization” – such as it is. We will be spending the next six or eight months in the Beagle Channel, experiencing winter in the very far south. We feel privileged to be able to see this area not just for a few days aboard a cruise ship or a few weeks in a yacht on the way to somewhere else, but through a whole cycle of seasons. And, of course, we’ll share our experiences with you along the way.
Ciao!
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
February 3, 2008
54°32.68'S 71°54.65'W
Caleta Brecknock, Western end of Canal Cockburn, Chile
The weather forecast for today:
EGC: 1831 2008/02/03 14:06:44 URGENT
FEB 03 2008 13:30 UTC.
SYNOPTIC SITUATION
FRONTAL EDGE TO UNSTABLE.
FORECAST: WIND W/NW 30/40 KT GUSTY 60 KT SHIFTING S/SW 40/50 KT (GALE) GUSTY 80 KT. WAVES 5-8M.
OUTLOOK: WIND S/SW 45/35 KT SHIFTING NW/W 30/40 KT (GALE) GUSTY 60KT.
Fortunately we are well tucked into this safe little cove with 4 lines ashore and 300' of chain out.
February 1, 2008
53°57.07'S 71°36.11'W
Caleta Hidden, opposite Cabo Froward, Straits of Magellan, Chile
Buenas!
Hawk is lying to her anchor and two stern lines off a rocky beach at the head of a narrow, mile and a half long inlet surrounded by low hills. We are now back in the far south where extreme weather tends to be the norm. We’ve had winds of gale force and higher since we reached this harbor on Wednesday, and after a twelve hour break tomorrow, another system will arrive with more of the same. For the most part, the strong winds outside our snug haven blow right over us, making a low humming sound that sometimes rises to a growl when a gust whips across the surface of the water. If it hits the boat just right, it causes the heater in the corner across from me to huff and snap, or to rumble in a low purr. The wind has many different voices down here, the most distinctive of which is the freight-train shriek it makes when it hits 50 or 60 knots. We’ve yet to hear that sound this trip, but when we were in this area in 2002 we would sometimes hear it for several minutes before Hawk got thrown back against her anchor or fetched up against her stern lines. The “Roaring Forties” are supposedly named for this unforgettable sound.
Wednesday, two days ago, was a typical day in Chilean Patagonia, to the extent that any day is typical. We had anchored Tuesday night at Bahía Mussel, a large bay located on Isla Carlos III right between Paso Tortuoso and Paso Ingles at roughly the midpoint of the Straits of Magellan. The westernmost point of Isla Carlos III is called Cabo Crosstides, and it is the place where the Pacific tide, flooding in from the western entrance to the Magellan, meets the Atlantic tide, flooding in from the east. As is to be expected, tidal currents in this area are quite confused, even more so because high tide on the Atlantic side is three hours earlier than high tide on the Pacific side. Luckily, the currents on either side rarely exceed three knots or so, enough to make life interesting but not dangerous – unless strong winds are opposing one or the other of the currents.
Besides straddling the crossroads where the two currents meet, Isla Carlos III marks the spot where the Straits of Magellan takes a little jog at Paso Tortuoso. From its western entrance, the Magellan runs straight southeast and averages five miles in width to the island, a distance of nearly 90 miles. High mountains border the Magellan for that entire length, many snow-capped and some covered with glaciers. So when strong northwest winds blow, they get funneled and accelerated down the length of the Magellan until they meet their first impediment – Isla Carlos III. The winds roar over the top of the island and back down again into the next section of the Magellan which runs southeast for another 40 miles before turning northeast at Cabo Froward, the most southerly point on the American continent. The island has two harbors that would be bulletproof anywhere else in the world. Here they are considered fair weather anchorages only.
And fair weather was what we had when we arrived on Tuesday night. We anchored at the head of Bahía Mussel knowing that the forecast called for moderate winds overnight, but it was supposed to die off early Wednesday when we planned to sail to the anchorage where we are now, forty miles further down the Magellan. The wind started to blow as forecast late in the afternoon at around 20 knots. But it built overnight, and by Wednesday morning we had a steady 30 knots with gusts up to 40. The anchorage had good holding in a deep mud bottom, and the island was too low to produce williwaws or rachas, the katabatic wind gusts that accelerate winds of that strength to 60 knots and more. Our anchor was well dug in, and we were perfectly safe.
But the forecast called for even stronger winds over the next three days, and both of us preferred to find a truly secure anchorage where we’d be sheltered from the wind and where we might be able to leave the boat and go ashore. Our only concern was the prospect of wind against tide in the Magellan. The strait was visible from our anchorage, and when we had first gotten up a layer of what appeared to be white mist hung over the frothing white of the water in Paso Ingles. The wind was picking up the water and atomizing it into smoke, which happens in williwaws or in wind against tide conditions. We waited a few hours until the tide had changed in our favor, which was fortunately with the wind, and the channel started looking passable.
So we decided to head out to our next anchorage. Evans motored up on the anchor while I raised it, and then we worked our way out of the harbor. On the chart, the anchorage was a blank space that showed almost no soundings. When traversing these not infrequent “white” areas on the charts, kelp is our guide. Kelp visible on the surface tends to be in depths of 30 feet or less, and there is almost always something shallower than that in the middle of a large kelp patch. As we were working our way out of the anchorage, we strayed a bit too far to the east and found ourselves blocked by two large areas of kelp. We were exposed to the full force of the wind in the channel, and it was blowing at close to 40 knots. We had to turn almost dead upwind and motor around these before we could fall off again and head out into the channel. Once out, we were able to get a sense of how much wind we really had, and we decided to put up the staysail.
As is often the case after the barometer finishes its drop and starts to rise, the day was sunny and bright, and visibility was nearly unlimited with white-capped peaks rising above rocky ridges in the distance on all sides. The wind had whipped the channel up into a welter of whitecaps and was blowing the crests of the two- to three-foot waves downwind into long, lacy fingers of spindrift. Hawk was racing along under just the staysail, doing 8 to 9 knots with a knot of current and 35 knots and more of wind over the stern.
Shortly after we came out of the anchorage, we saw a freighter coming our way. All crews sailing yachts in the channels are required to monitor channel 16 and to report to lighthouses, freighters, naval patrol vessels – anyone who calls them. As is usually the case, the pilot called us in Spanish, and I spent ten minutes on the radio giving him our name, call sign, port of origin, port of destination, flag, number of people on board and so on. Since the first week in January, this has been our only interaction with other people down here. We have spoken on the radio with three lighthouse keepers, a half dozen pilots on freighters, and two other crews on yachts – neither of whom we managed to share an anchorage with.
It took us just over four hours to make good the 35 miles to our next anchorage. For some time before we reached it, we could see Cabo Froward, the blunt, mesa-like cape that marks the southernmost extent of the American continent – south of this cape to Cape Horn, all of the land masses are islands. From now until we leave the Beagle in eight months or so, we won’t touch on the mainland again, at least not with the boat. Yet the islands are large enough to include some of the highest mountains in the Andes which are covered with snowfields and glaciers. The largest island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, is about half the size of Tasmania or Ireland, yet its population (115,000) is well less than that of a small American city.
As its name suggests, the entrance to Caleta Hidden was all but impossible to see until we were right on top of it. Several small islands and some very large kelp patches lay off a low peninsula that blended into the higher land behind. As we passed the kelp patches, we startled a snoozing sea lion whose flippers were waving in the air. He rolled over and poked his head out of the water when he was just six feet off our beam, did a most comical double-take, and then somersaulted away from us in a flurry of nose, flippers and tail. Peale’s dolphins joined us as we reached the entrance and darted ahead of the boat to lead the way in. These handsome dolphins are native to the channels and look very similar to Dusky dolphins with dark gray to black coloration except for gray sides and a wave-shaped gray stripe that runs from their tail to their dorsal fin. One leaped clear out of the water as we entered, apparently delighted to have company.
Just as we came through the entrance, I caught sight of what looked to be a white snowball at the tide line on shore. I grabbed the binoculars and saw a pair of kelp geese, the male an astonishingly bright white color that makes him stand out like a red buoy in this landscape, and the female a mix of brown and black that allows her to blend in completely with her background. Several chicks waddled along after their parents as they scrambled higher up the beach to get away from Hawk. As we motored into the entrance, a pair of steamer ducks took off in a flurry of whitewater. Like the kelp geese, these flightless ducks are found nowhere else in the world. When threatened, they take off across the water pinwheeling their wings and kicking their feet like a windup toy, throwing up a welter of water while they steam off.
Based on the forecast, we had expected the wind to drop during the day, but when we reached the entrance it was still blowing strongly in the Magellan. It was a relief, then, to round the corner and have the wind drop immediately. The bay was bordered by two long, relatively low ridges covered with tussock grass and sparsely dotted with stunted trees. The sides of the inlet closed in about halfway down its length, where we had to pick our way through a narrow channel between an island and a large kelp patch. On the other side of this, the inlet opened again into a large basin a half a mile or so in width with 20 knots of wind blowing down from the head of the harbor. A much smaller basin lay at the head, where a cove was backed by a beach of flat stones with tall trees behind it. The best berth would be backed right up to the beach in that cove with an anchor out off the bow and two lines off our stern tied to the trees ashore. That would orient our stern to the southwest, and the trees would protect us from the wind.
So now the shore line process began. We carry two tall mesh bags – about chest height – with a metal hoop in the mouth so they stay open on their own. Each bag holds a 300-foot polypropylene line. When we’re underway, these are secured standing up in front of the binnacle. I had already taken these and placed them out on the sidedeck, laid on their sides, with the mouth open. I had pulled about twenty feet of line out of each bag, taken it through the stern pulpit on the same side and then coiled it and put the loop around the primary winch. I had opened the large blocks attached to the stern quarter through which our stern lines run, but I had not put the lines through the blocks – that would wait until after we had run the line ashore. Now it was time to put the dinghy in the water. Evans motored upwind until we were most of the way across the basin and then put the boat in neutral and let her drift.
We never tow the dinghy in the channels – the winds are just too unpredictable – and we certainly wouldn’t tow it in the conditions in the Magellan that day. So our inflatable dinghy was stowed right side up on deck. We attached a halyard to the bridle inside of it, untied it from the deck and, without lifting it from the coachroof positioned it so that the stern was over the sidedeck. Evans got the outboard off its mount at the back of the boat, and he carried it around to the dinghy and secured it. I winched the dinghy off the deck and over the lifelines and Evans eased it over the side of the boat. He secured the painter as tightly as he could to the spring cleat, and I lowered the dinghy into the water. I went back to the cockpit, took the helm and turned us back upwind while Evans dropped down into the dinghy alongside the boat and started the outboard. He left it running and climbed back aboard, and then he took the helm. He started backing toward the head of the cove while I freed the anchor and set up the snubber. Our guide showed that we would need to anchor in about 25-30 feet to have enough scope to reach the shore with the lines. When we were still a ways from where he wanted to drop the anchor, he had me drop 25 feet of chain over the bow.
Judging distance to shore can be very difficult. About the only thing that offers some scale are the trees. But in some anchorages, these grow to only fifteen or twenty feet in height, while in more protected anchorages they may be twice that high. From one anchorage to another, then, your eye can easily be deceived. Evans is very good at telling how far we are and deciding where to drop the anchor. I have learned not to question his judgment, because I am almost always wrong. Evans called to me to start dropping, and though I thought we were much to close, I let the anchor go, calling out the amount of chain as it went over the bow roller – “50 feet, 75 feet, 100 feet, 125 feet.” At that point, Evans called to me to come back to the stern. The boat was in reverse and the helm locked. “I want the port line,” he said, as he lowered himself over the side and into the dinghy. I grabbed the coiled line off the port winch as he pulled himself to the stern. I tossed the coils into the dinghy and he grabbed it. Then he took off at full throttle toward the shore.
This is the part where I usually get nervous. Most of the safest coves are also the smallest ones, some no more than about twice the width of the boat. If the wind is doing anything but blowing us straight in or straight out of the cove, we have a tendency to drift toward the shore. If we have the boat in reverse, the prop walk can also carry us toward the shore. Evans always picks the line that is slightly upwind to take ashore first, and he gets it tied to something as quickly as possible so that I can use it to hold the boat in position. We have learned that the best way to do this is to run in with the outboard even if Evans has to row the last bit to get through kelp. We have also learned to leave the line out of the block it will later run through, otherwise kinks in the line pull Evans up short and have almost jerked him right out of the dinghy. In the narrowest coves with wind on the beam, we will drop an anchor on short scope at the mouth of the cove and Evans will take our longest line – over 600 feet – in and secure it. I will then winch us in using the primary winches – but that’s a lot more work than getting close to the shore and getting the line ashore efficiently. In this harbor I wasn’t worried – the beach was a hundred feet wide, and there was nothing for us to hit. All I had to do was to keep the boat reversing into the wind so we didn’t bounce forward while I waited for Evans to find a good tree and tie the line to it.
Evans landed the dinghy on the beach, cut the outboard, tossed the dinghy anchor onto the rocks, and took the line ashore. He strode quickly to the back of the beach and started looking for a good tree. He had to toss the line over a high branch, but then he pulled a lot of line through and tied a loop long enough that the bowline that held it was over the edge of the beach, where he could reach it easily when we were leaving. Once he yelled to me that it was secure, I put the line on the primary and started grinding it in, stopping only to put the line through the snatch block and close it when I had some tension on it. Evans pulled himself back to the boat using the line I was winching in, climbed up on board and started letting out more chain while I continued to pull the line in astern. When we started to get close to the kelp line just off the beach, I went below and got our handheld depth sounder. We were about 25 feet off the beach with 12 feet of water at the stern at mid-tide, so we decided we were in a good position. Evans then climbed back in the dinghy and we repeated the process for the second line. There was some more back and forth as we put the snubber on the anchor chain and again made sure our rudder had sufficient depth before the boat was fully secured.
From the time we reach an anchorage until the boat is secured, the sails flaked and covered, the extra line back in each of the bags, and we’re able to strip out of our foul weather gear can be anywhere from forty-five minutes to two hours, depending on how many lines we put out and if we have to move any before we’re done. In this case, it took about an hour and a half. We had gotten up at 7:00, watched the weather and the tide until 11:00, sailed until 3:00 and went below at 4:30. And we had sailed through some of the most magnificent scenery on the planet and seen some of the most unusual wildlife. Not a bad day.
Here’s to a typical day in a most unusual place,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk
January 14, 2008
50°56'S 73°51'W
Caleta Amalia, Estero Amalia, Chile
Feliz Año Nuevo!
We are anchored in a most amazing anchorage, and we have enjoyed the most wonderful day. Hawk is swinging to her anchor in Caleta Amalia within sight of the Amalia Glacier. The whole of the glacier can be seen from on deck, two rivers of blue and white ice that surge down two mountain valleys, twisting and turning around the rugged snow-capped peak that separates them. They converge at the bottom in a single field of crevassed blue ice where glacier meets sea in a wall almost two miles wide and well more than 100 feet high.
The Amalia Glacier is just one of dozens that reach the sea in this central area of the Chilean channels, all flowing out of the 16,000 square kilometer Southern Patagonian Ice Cap (Campo de Hielo Sur) which lies draped across the Andes from about 48°30'S to 51°30'S. The proximity of 10,000 foot high Andean peaks to the sea and the almost constant precipitation along this stretch of the coast produces vast snowfields that blanket the peaks and feeds the long rivers of ice that follow the valleys downward on both the Chilean and the Argentinean sides of the border. In Argentina, the glaciers have created large lakes, but on the Chilean side they meet the sea which has invaded the valleys between the peaks in long, winding fjords. For almost 180 miles along this part of the coast, if you pick a wide fjord that heads east, you will eventually come to a glacier. But most of those glaciers lie up 30-mile long fjords that afford no shelter to a yacht, and the winds funnel down off the mountains in great gusts that carry ice out of the fjords while making it difficult for a sailboat to reach the glacier face.
Estero Amalia, the ten-mile long fjord with the Amalia glacier at its head, is the first to open off a much larger channel called Estero Peel. After Amalia leaves it to the south, Estero Peel runs northeast for another twenty miles before splitting into two arms each of which extend an additional twenty miles into the heart of the Andes. Almost all of the many arms that open up off of Estero Peel terminate in sea level glaciers, and dozens of other glaciers can be seen spilling down from the higher peaks of the interior. When Tilman decided to climb the Southern Patagonian ice cap he chose to do it from Estero Peel. He arrived here aboard his sailboat, Mischief, with a crew to watch the boat. He found so much ice in Amalia that he could not reach the anchorage where we are now sitting. He was gone for several weeks, and the crew he left on the boat had to keep moving from anchorage to anchorage as the ice shifted around them. At one point, they were embayed, trapped, and in getting away a large growler damaged the propeller of the boat so that the motor could no longer be used. When Tilman returned to the vessel after having successfully crossed the ice cap, they had to sail out through the convoluted channels some forty miles to the Pacific before running north offshore to reach a port where they could make repairs.
Amalia is considered one of the most accessible glaciers in the area. Estero Amalia runs southeast for ten miles after opening off of Peel before swinging to the east for another five and terminating in the ice field in front of the glacier face. The entire fjord is deep and free of dangers. Just where the fjord turns to the east, a protected anchorage lies on the western shore affording a perfect view of the entire glacier from the peaks that feed the twin arms to the blue and white where ice meets the sea. This is the only anchorage within sight of a glacier on this stretch of the coast, and only one of two in all of the Chilean channels.
Amalia may be accessible, but that does not mean that it is always easy to get to, as Tilman’s experience demonstrates. Even if ice conditions allow an approach to the glacier face, the 300 days of rain a year in this area make the chances of really seeing the glacier pretty small. Strong southwesterly winds can make it difficult to get down the fjord to the glacier; strong westerly winds can make it difficult to get back out Estero Peel to the main channels heading north and south. This is the second time we have tried to reach the Amalia Glacier. When we were on our way south in November of 2002, a strong southerly wind had blown a huge amount of ice out of the fjord and into Estero Peel. None of the pieces were very large, but they were densely spread across the channel, and we could not begin to find a way through – we didn’t even make it into Estero Amalia from Estero Peel.
Yesterday when we reached Estero Peel, there wasn’t so much as an ice cube to be seen. It was so completely different neither of us could quite believe it. Though it was overcast, the clouds were high enough that we could see the tops of most of the peaks bordering the channel. As we entered Caleta Amalia, we were greeted by a pod of Peale’s dolphins. We could only see them when they surfaced because the glacial melt water was opaque, with the milky color that comes from the rock, silt and sand deposited by the glacier as it retreats. The dolphins stayed with us all the way down the ten-mile long fjord, and we were starting to think we might make it all the way to the glacier face. But then we sighted a line of white that started at the headland that still hid the glacier from us. When we reached it, it proved to be a densely packed covering of ice cube- to furniture-sized pieces of ice that had been trapped in that end of the bay by the last week of strong northerly winds. We motored up to the pack ice and then paralleled it, trying to get the best angle on the glacier. As we went, ice bumped and scraped along Hawk’s sides, much louder than it seemed possible such little pieces of ice could be. Though we were some five miles away, we couldn’t get any closer to the glacier face. But we were not disappointed. We motored to the anchorage facing the glacier and dropped the anchor, enjoying the glacier from a distance.
Today we had a forecast for light southwest winds which usually means at least some sunshine. We woke to hard rain and temperatures in the low forties, but as the day progressed, sunshine alternated with squalls. Every time the sun came out, I popped out on deck to look around. When it was sunny over the boat, heavy clouds had crept down to completely cover the glacier; when it was sunny over the glacier it was raining hard over the boat. By 5:00 in the evening, I had given up and was hard at work on an article when Evans went out on deck. He called down to me a few minutes later, “I don’t know where all the ice has gone, but we could get within a half mile of the glacier face right now if you want to.” Within ten minutes we had the anchor up and were motoring across the fjord toward the glacier with the dolphins once again gamboling in our bow wave. Evans was right – in just 24 hours, the ice that had completely blocked us the day before had all but disappeared, and we were able to go three and a half miles further than the day before. Just as we reached the pack ice at the foot of the glacier, the clouds parted and we were given the gift of an hour of bright sunlight.
I climbed into the dinghy to take pictures of the boat in front of the glacier. Once in the dinghy, I got a little away from the boat and turned off the engine. The dolphins were circling around me, surfacing within less than ten feet, and their sudden sharp exhalations sounded like the sea breathing. I was surrounded by icebergs shining bright blue and green in the sunshine, and I could hear the water lapping gently up under their worn edges, a sound like bathwater moving around in a bathtub. In the background, the distant echo of whitewater came to me from the dozen waterfalls running down the bare rock face swept clean by the retreating glacier. And in front of me, Hawk was dwarfed by the wall of ice rising up above her mast, a pale blue and white wall shot through with the hard cobalt blue of the open ocean. Though the boat and the glacier face were in bright sunshine, dark clouds hovered over the mountains behind the glacier, curling and coiling in the light breeze like smoke. As the clouds passed by, the sun came and went, first reflecting off the glacier in a white dazzle and then catching a deep blue crevasse and making it shimmer as if it were lit from within.
I had been taking pictures for forty minutes when Evans called, “You’d better get back to the boat. We’re about to get rained on.” I looked over my shoulder to see that a black squall had dragged a curtain of rain across the entire fjord. I turned back and snapped my last picture, and only when I looked at it later did I see that I had caught a dolphin surfacing off Hawk’s quarter and an iceberg right by her bow in a photo that looks as if it could only have been created on the computer. I got back to the boat and we got the dinghy back on board, and then the rain came in a cold, soaking deluge. The dolphins went with us as we left the glacier face, and one even leaped right out of the water within five feet of the bow of the boat, looking startled to see the boat bearing down upon him. When we got back to the anchorage and dropped anchor, the dolphins swam around the boat for another fifteen minutes as if hoping that we would come out to play once again.
What a wonderful day in a magnificent place…
Hope whatever you’ve been dreaming of proves worth the wait,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk