Uttermost

Was it all a dream?  Or a giant conspiracy, featuring photos shot on a sound stage, like the moon landing?

Not just another marina experience

 Every trail comes to an end.  For our first season in Chile, the trail's end was Puerto Williams.

Looking past the armada dock, over the Beagle Channel to Argentina

Puerto Williams is the southernmost town in the world - 65 nautical miles north of Cape Horn, on the Beagle Channel.  The "yacht club" there is a very famous place in the very obscure world of everyday people who like to do adventurous things funded out of their own pockets on their own boats.  The club consists of the Micalvi, a 1920s freighter that has been scuttled in a little inlet to make a structure for visiting boats to raft to.

Since Patagonia is "the uttermost place in the world", the Micalvi is by extension the uttermost yacht club in the world.  We hear that it can be a bit hectic in the summer when the charter boats are loading and unloading passengers.  But when Galactic arrived we swelled the population to six crewed yachts.  The large majority of the boats were empty, their owners elsewhere for the austral winter.

Those five other crews, not surprisingly, provided us with the society of some ridiculously simpatico people.  Those who winter in the far south - that would be our crowd.  The people to whom we have to explain nothing.

Alisa, the master at figuring out any provisioning situation

But now we've left that crowd behind.  We set out north - first on the hour-long flight to Punta Arenas, then the next day the flight up to Santiago and then the red-eye to JFK.  And we landed in the delights of the boreal summer, and the company of our families.

We'll be going back to Williams soon.  When we get there it won't be our first season in Patagonia any more.  And we'll have a new season to make the most of.