We have spent the past 12 months cruising the Chilean channels, going North from The Horn to Puerto Montt during the Southern summer of 2001/2002 and then back south during the Southern summer of 2002/2003. Even after many months we have barely scratched the surface of this cruising ground. Just imagine 1000 miles of Maine islets and channels set against the mountains of Yosemite with absolutely no trash on the tide line, no towns or marinas, lobster pots or tourists, about a third of it uncharted. In a typical day, dolphins guide us into and out of our anchorage, sea lions play with us when we explore by dinghy, and a dozen different species of seabirds feed in frantic flocks over seething shoals of fish.
Evans overlooking Puerto Hoppner
On the other hand, it is cold, wet and rather windy. Usually you can not see the spectacular mountains through the rain and hail. Getting settled in at night is quite hard work because most anchorages require a bow anchor plus two lines tied to trees ashore. There is constant coastal navigation compelling close attention, with rocks and occasionally ice littered all around.
There are literally thousands of excellent anchorages, many of them still undocumented, but the most important anchorages are clearly laid out in the RCC/Imray guide “Chile, Arica Desert to Tierra de Fuego” and the Chilean “Yachtsman’s Navigator Guide” by Alberto Mantellero. New editions of both are due out in 2003. You can find as many of the ‘undiscovered’ anchorages as you desire with the Chilean Hydrographic atlas, a book containing all of Chile’s charts in full color, full detail but 1/3 size.
Anyone cruising down here would be well advised to make time for a month’s cruising in the Beagle alone. A half a dozen major glaciers roll in huge, frozen white and blue waves down from the rocky mountaintops to reach sea level in the channel itself. Born eons ago in the frosty air of the 6,000 to 8,000 foot high peaks to the north of the channel, and fed by the year-round snow squalls at those altitudes, the brilliant white snowfields at the top of these glaciers cover the shoulders and bowls under stony crags before spilling down the ravines between the massifs in rivers of white ice cut by horizontal fractures caused by the slow slippage of highly compacted ice down the steep slopes. When illuminated by the sun, incredible colors flash from the walls of ice within these striations – the breathtaking blue of topaz and the hard green glow of emerald.
Beth and Evans at Seno Iceburg
Puerto Natales and Torres de Paine is the other ‘must see’ area to budget extra time for, however the town anchorage is very bad. There are some good anchoring spots away from town, but to clear in and out you must still spend several days in a horrible and unsafe anchorage. An alternative is to leave your boat in Puerto Montt or Puerto Williams and fly or take the NaviMag ferry to the area.
My personal favorite cruising area was between the Gulfo do Penas and the Magellan. Here you can explore glaciers and uncharted fjords, anchor in well protected tree-lined coves every night in almost ‘pure’ nature, untouched by humans. Further north the normal trash starts in the tide line and a few fishing towns appear while further south the trees have been blown away, the land gets almost too stark and the Chilean navy starts taking an almost obsessive interest in your movements.
Most of the cruising boats come down here extremely well prepared, but we have noticed four specific areas where many boats could have used a bit more preparation:
1. You need a good tide book or program (you should check to make sure you have Bahia Woods as a tidal station). We used Tides32, a freeware program. The tides at Puerto Montt are in the 20-foot range, and there are several spots along the canals where you need to catch the right current.
2. The cabin heater needs a stack that will not down draft in 40-50 knot gusts, and you need to carry enough fuel to run it say 8 hours a day for 2 months. Most of the permanent charter boats use “H” chimneys, but our impression is that the location is more important that the type. The chimney head needs to be up and out in a clear air flow, away from the turbulence caused by the deck/cabin trunk/mainsail cover and mast.
3. Your main anchor needs to be storm size as you will truly get 50 knots several times a month. You need 4 (at least) 100-meter polypropylene lines. Polypro floats, is easier to dinghy ashore than nylon and does not absorb water. However some additional nylon lines are useful if you plan to go to Antarctica as ice will float over it and not get trapped. You need a good system for deploying and retrieving the lines quickly and easily. Line spools are the system of choice for the charter boats. We did not like the clutter on deck that spools cause so used tall and narrow mesh bags. These allow the lines to run in and out without tangling (unlike the more normal duffle shape) and also allowed the lines to dry through the mesh. Finally, something to cut kelp off the chain and anchor is needed – most boats use a machete but we mounted a very large serrated stainless knife on a 5-foot sail batten.
Humpback Whales near Puerto Eden
It is much easier to go from north to south than visa versa. Going north, we had expected to be reaching/running in W/SW winds at least one-third of the time. However, the canals generally slant from SE toward the NW. This funnels winds with any westerly component in it down the canals from the NW. Even when it's blowing SW 20-25 offshore, the wind is bent to NW 15 with gusts to 30 in the canals. In one two month period we had only two days with winds other than right on the nose, most of it 25-30 knots apparent. Fortunately, Hawk proved to be a comfortable and competent foul weather upwind machine.
It is probably easiest to go north in March and April due to more variable wind directions than in the summer. Later than that and the hours of daylight get quite short in the winter restricting your range between safe anchorages, and many of the better anchorages are iced in and inaccessible.
This can be a treacherous route and requires some care. Of the eight boats that came down the Argentinean coast at the same time we did, one turned back with mechanical failure in the face of 50 knots headwinds, one was dismasted in the Straits of Le Maire, one was knocked down past the horizontal twice in 70-knot winds while offshore near Puerto Montt, one dragged anchor in 60 knots and went up on the rocks at Picton Island in the eastern entrance to the Beagle Channel (they rowed an anchor out and winched her off safely), another hit the rocks when caught by rachas while trying to maneuver into a sheltered cove on Staten Island, and another spent half a day stuck on a glacial moraine waiting for the tide.
As we entered the Beagle’s northwest arm, we came to Ventisquero Holandia (the Holland Glacier), the first in a series of glaciers that come down to sea level or within a hundred feet on the north side of the channel. Ahead of us, we could see the snowfields and peaks above Ventisquero Italia, Francia, Alemania and Romanche. The last is the largest along the Beagle at something like fifty-square miles, and it lies below Monte Darwin, at 8,000 feet the highest peak in the Cordillera Darwin range. Darwin’s own description of this part of the Beagle gives some idea of what it was like:
“In many parts, magnificent glaciers extend from the mountain side to the water’s edge. It is scarcely possible to imagine anything more beautiful that the beryl-like blue of these glaciers, and especially as contrasted with the dead white of the upper expanse of snow. The fragments which had fallen from the glacier into the water were floating away, and the channel with its icebergs presented, for the space of a mile, a miniature likeness of the Polar Sea.”
The water color changed as we reached the meltwater from these glaciers, becoming a milky teal instead of the clear sea green of the channels. This opalescence in the water, as if it contained moonlight, continued all the way up the Beagle, and is something we have never heard remarked upon. Yet the water color seemed an integral part of the rest of the scene – it softened the sea’s surface, making it less brittle and reflective and more part of a dreamy otherworld where mountains of ice cascaded down in scintillting layers of blue and green.
To the west of the Beagle, from Brecknock to the Magellan channel, we entered a second climactic zone. Here the coastline is open to the full fetch of the Pacific, creating two differences from the Beagle. This is where the southern ocean lows dump most of their moisture as they cross the shoreline. It is much rainier, frequently mixed with hail in the squall lines. The winds are also stronger as they come in directly from the ocean, undeflected by land or hills. The hilltops are bare stone covered by snow and the few small trees cowering from the wind in gullies and coves are gnarled and twisted.
Hidden in this area is one of the world’s most spectacular coves – Caleta Brecknock. To find it you must sail up three miles of narrow, twisting, turning and branching fjords. Here slate-covered cliffs rose on either side of us to heights of 3,000 or 4,000 feet, almost without vegetation. Ahead of us, the channel doglegged and the cliffs appeared to meet, but as we approached and made the turn we found a narrow channel opening up at the end of which lay a cul-de-sac of solid rock walls. A waterfall fell down the wall directly ahead of us, and to the right of that two flat-topped rock columns rose from the water to heights of several thousand feet. Around the corner to the left, behind a low peninsula covered in stunted beech, lay a tiny cove the size of two standard marina slips. We motored close in and dropped the anchor in fifty feet of water, then dinghied our 600-foot Spectra line ashore, tying it to a tree at the back of the cove. Once we winched and reversed into the cove, the bullets of wind coming up the channel could no longer reach us, and we found ourselves in a placid pool surrounded on all sides except over the bow by land within a boat length. An otter floated on his back 15 yards off our bow eating mussels while watching us work.
Landing on the hill behind the boat, we struck off toward the overhanging lake and waterfall just over the shoulder to the east of us. We climbed up the gullies where the vegetation gave us some purchase and avoided the slippery bare rock of the shoulders and plateaus. After a half hour of relatively easy but soggy scrambling, we came out on one of the rocky shoulders overlooking the lake. Several acres in extent, it lay about at our mast height above the head of the fjord. The wind chased ripples across the steel gray water, which looked cold and forbidding in the gray overcast. Beyond this lake we could just make out another, larger lake at sea level over the next ridge.
From above the lake, we had a panoramic view of the cul-de-sac in which we were anchored. We could just glimpse Hawk’s mast rising above the trees in the sheltered notch to the west. Other than that, the fjord we had entered ended here in a gray-walled chamber whose sides rose hundreds of feet almost sheer from the water. We could not see down Seno Ocasion because the channel dog-legged at an even higher peak a few tenths of a mile from the anchorage. Here a huge waterfall dropped for hundreds of feet, a long, white ribbon against the steel gray of the rock. The whole looked like we had managed to spirit Hawk several thousand feet up some mountains and drop her down into a landlocked alpine lake.
From the Magellan channel up to the Gulf of Penas the South Pacific high starts to have an influence. Immediately north of the Magellan the land and vegetation look much gentler and softer. As a low passes to the south, it creates a 'crush zone' between it and the high, packing the isobars closely together and causing a band of very strong northwesterly winds. As the lows move away to the SE, the high pushes back down creating softer and warmer weather (usually still westerly winds).
Seno Iceberg, is typical of the many dramatic glacier fjords in this section. The fjord runs for some fifteen miles on a roughly easterly course. Conifer forests blanketed the slopes, and rocky buttes thrust out from the verdant greenery at regular intervals along the channel. The peaks disappeared into mist and low cloud cover. Waterfalls ran down every valley and hollow, slipping from the unseen rocks above. As the clouds lifted a bit, we saw the snow cover feeding those falls, not just on the peaks, but for several hundred meters down into the tree line. The trees were coated in white and looked terribly fragile but quite beautiful. For the first seven or eight miles nothing indicated that we were entering a glacier fjord except for the milky quality. But as we passed the slight bend where our course went from south of east to north of east, we came upon our first boat–sized icebergs. The sun had managed to put in a ghost-like appearance overhead, and the light turned these small bergs a tantalizing blue.
The fjord narrows down to about a half mile in width just before the glacier, then opens up into an ice-filled lagoon about a mile across at the base of the ice flow. This glacier is retreating, and the narrows is where the face was located for many hundreds of years. The almost circular lagoon beyond was studded with waterfalls. The mile-wide glacier face rose up from the smoky green water littered with small bergs and growlers. At one end, the face ended in a rock shoulder recently uncovered by its retreat and colonized by bright red moss. An arm of the glacier still rested round this shoulder, running down into a chute of scoured granite half a mile long ground to perfect smoothness by the unimaginable pressure of ice over eons. The smoothly scoured tan rocks and the red moss on the rugged shoulder contrasted in both color and texture with the beautiful blue hues revealed within the deeply crevassed ice.
Just slightly off one side of the center of the long face, a huge area of the deepest blue we have ever seen lay exposed to the light. It looked as if a giant piece of ice had calved off at this spot within the last few days or weeks, leaving the rock hard center of millennia old compressed blue ice visible from over a mile away. We scanned it with the binoculars, astonished at the utter clarity and incredible beauty of the color. In another area of the face, the ice rose up in dark blue and white striations, opening outward like the blooms on a flower.
About every hour a major chunk of ice broke off the glacier face with a tremendous crack, fell into the water with an enormous splash, and then started gently drifting away. The bigger chunks created mini-tsunamis as they hit the water. The six-foot waves moved in slow motion through the field of ice, rearing up to twice that height as they broke on the shore.
From the Gulf of Penas to Puerto Montt, high pressure dominates during the summer, with lots of sun and light southerly winds. This area is like 1950s Maine. Small bright yellow wooden fishing boats are scattered across the water, with a man or two tending hand lines and fishing villages with brightly painted churches cluster at the head of the best harbors. Castro on Chiloe Island may become Camden’s spiritual neighbor as a few summer homes for the wealthy from Santiago are just springing up.
Chiloe has gentle rolling hills covered with large stands of trees separating checkerboard green fields, a striking contrast to the rugged wilderness we’d traveled through for over 600 miles. In Estero Pailad, a pod of Black dolphins, a very rare species found only along this part of the coast escort us two miles up a river into the anchorage. Huge flocks of Lapwings wheel and scoot across from one side of the estuary to the other, their cries so loud we can hear them down below most of the time. Buff-necked Ibises fly by in groups of fifteen or twenty, their metallic cries alerting us to grab the binoculars for a close look. Olivaceous, King and Guanay (with bright red feet) Cormorants feed all over the estuary and fly by in large flocks. Peruvian Pelicans also wing by in vee-formation in the morning and evening. Coming into this harbor we saw penguins and pelicans on the same rock in the middle of the channel along with cormorants, terns and gulls. Penguins and pelicans in the same place seemed very strange! And then there are our new favorites - Andean Gulls. These are smallish gulls that are almost tern-like. They breed at 4,000 feet then come down to sea level in the winter. Their brown head, whitish body and a pink wash on their breasts make them very distinctive. Our 12 months of cruising in the Chilean channels proved to be tough and often lonely, but also everything we had hoped for when we built our 47-foot sloop Hawk. Holed up for the southern winter in Puerto Montt with rain continually tapping on the coachroof, we remembered with nostalgia the snowcapped peaks, the calving glaciers, the lacy waterfalls and the wildlife we saw every day. As an Irishman told us about Ireland: “It is fortunate the weather is so bad because otherwise we would be overrun by holiday homes and shopping malls”.
S/V Hawk: Top Anchorages from South to North up the Chilean Canals Dec. 2002
Puerto Williams 54 56.1S 67 37.12W Best propane, bulletproof harbor
Ushuaia 54 48.67S 68 18.4W Best Provisions, cheapest fuel, poor harbor/docks
Navarino 54 55.4S 68 19.3W
Olla 54 56.43S 69 09.41W 5 Star – beach, walks and glacier
Evening 54 57.8S 69 30.8W Use as anchorage to see Pia glacier
Chair 54 53.997S 70 00.8W
Engano 54 56.9S 70 46.6W
Tabien 54 49S 70 57.2W Small landlocked lagoon not shown on chart, used by fishermen
Brecknock 54 32.68S 71 54.65W 5 Star, excellent walks, need to tie in very close to shore
Parmelia 54 17.975S 71 51.455W
Elsa 54 03.47S 71 43.44W Not shown on Chart or RCC guide
Gallant 53 41.92S 71 59.27W Anchor and swing (no shore lines)
Mussel 53 36.74S 72 18.13W
Notch 53 23.96S 72 49.18W 4 Star, good walks, anchor in middle or tie to thick trees in NW corner
Mostyn 53 15.438S 73 22.23W Best on Desolation for NW winds
Teokita 52 41.2S 73 45.2W
Mardon 52 09.5S 73 42.6W Main harbor is windy, but cove on north shore just before main harbor is excellent
Moonlight 51 34.35S 74 01.9W 4 Star, good walking after dinghy ride to western end
Bueno 50 59.24S 74 13.04W 4 Star, nice walks
Paroquet 50 40S 74 33.03W Nice walk
Tom 50 11.8S 74 48.93W Bulletproof, but not so scenic
Refugio 49 52.63S 74 25W 3 Star, Excellent walking, very scenic, adequate protection
Grappler 49 25S 74 18W
Rio Fri 49 12.87S 74 23.8W
Eden 49 07.61S 74 24.85W Expensive fuel & a little food, best cove is just to north of Armada station
Grey 48 55.48S 74 18.33W Fresh water anchorage
Vittorio 48 54S 74 20W Better protection than Grey
Ivonne 48 39.82S 74 19.315W Visit Iceberg glacier - 5 Star, one of best glacier in all canals
Point Lay 48 20.61S 74 33.41W Nice waterfall in anchorage
Francisco 47 44.996S 74 33.965W 3 Star, fresh water anchorage
Suarez 46 37.4S 75 27W
Skyring 45 57.6S 74 58.8W
Canaveral 45 53.08S 74 49.99W
Millabu 45 44S 74 38W Scenic, nice walks, adequate protection, shallows extend further than on chart
Pireta 45 48.05S 74 23.4W
Jacqueline 45 43.92S 73 57.51W Tuck into cove near waterfall with two shore lines
Sepulcro 45 17.2S 73 44.7W
Rosita 45 14S 73 30W Pretty
Americano 45 01.39S 73 42W
Ampro 44 53.86S 73 17.12W
Cuptana 44 40.11S 73 38.25W
Filomena 44 28.13S 73 38.42W
Puyuguapi 44 24.86S 72 38.64W 5 Star, Hot springs health spa with excellent food, laundry and fuel, mooring buoy
Anihue 43 52.34S 73 02.44W
Tictoc (Juan Yates) 43 38.6S 73 00.7W Playful dolphins chase dinghy
Huildad 43 04.265S 73 31.595W Strong current in anchorage
Pailad 42 52S 73 36W Pretty church and black necked swans, Current in anchorage, use any free mooring buoy (they have 4 ton anchors)
Pindo 42 36.9S 73 30.5W
Castro 42 28.67S 73 45.5W
Mechuque 42 19.43S 73 15.25W Anchor in eastern lagoon, not off town
Bonito 42 08.1S 72 34.5W 4 Star - tie to floating fisherman docks (visit beautiful Quintupeu from here, can tie to fish farm buoys in Quintupeu)
Puerto Montt 41 29S 72 58W Marine del Sur (expensive/nice) or Oxxean (cheaper/less nice), or go to Valdivia for best boat work at Awloplast (and slightly nicer town)
To Cape Horn:
Puerto Williams
Puerto Toro 55 04S 67 04W
Maxwell 55 49.4S 67 30.6W Good protection, best in easterly, can not get on Zarpe but can get permission over radio from Faro Hornos
Cape Horn
Martial 55 49.3S 67 17.7W Very windy but very good holding, not good in easterly
Lennox 55 17S 66 50W
Banner 55 01S 66 56W
Eugenio 54 56S 67 17W Can not get on Zarpa but can stop if faced with strong westerly winds
Puerto Williams