Bad Math

 The game is afoot.

A stop in the Chiloé fishing town of Quemchi produced a welder who could fashion us a pair of chumaceras, oarlocks for our new dinghy.  Any gear needs that occur after that, we'll have to satisfy with whatever we have on board.

Setting the crab pot for the first time

Our path south along Chiloé has taken us through waters that are familiar from our February cruise.  We stopped again in Mechuque, one of our favorite spots, and had a great catch-up with our mates on Windora, who are a few weeks behind us on the path south.

We anchored again at Isla Talcan, though at a new-to-us anchorage, where all of these pictures were taken.

Footprints

And now we find ourselves back at Quellon.  It seems that Alisa made a math error in Puerto Montt and came up with the answer "six" when she was tackling the question of "how many kilos of potatoes do we need for the winter, or at least until we reach Puerto Natales?"

This is not the right answer.

And I, when I was telling the armada guy in Puerto Montt the date when we would get to Puerto Natales, answered "el siete de mayo."  

Somehow that seemed much much further away than the seventh of May, which would not be nearly enough time.

So we couldn't let Quellon pass us by without 1) taking the chance for our last supermercado visit for weeks and weeks, and 2) to visit the armada station and let them know that el siete de junio would be a better bet for expecting us in Natales.

(I'm struck that I should post a map of all these places we're visiting in Chile, as that would doubtless make the plot easier to follow.  Well.  I'll have the combination of free time and adequate bandwidth to do that just as soon as I'm back in a government job in Alaska.)

The boys, meanwhile, have such fond memories of our last visit to Quellon that they've told us they will refuse to go ashore there.

We could make them, of course.  But we have planned a lightning-quick, two-pronged, staggered maneuver involving a public mooring, the handheld VHF, and sequential visits to supermercado and armada.  Doing those kids-free is just fine with us, thank you very much.

Patagonia beach picnic

And today we sailed all day from Talcan, with the Andes sullen behind us, and termination dust, which everyone knows is Alaskan for the first snow of autumn, on the closest peak.  The cordillera was glowering beneath a ceiling of complex cloud shapes in pearl-gray, smoke-gray, and gray-gray.  When we left the anchorage at dawn I looked back at the shore and felt that replacement of banality by wonder that marks the best of the life afloat.

No bad weather has caught up with us yet.

I'm alive with the adventure of it all...