Rollin'

We've been in Chile since Christmas Eve, and we've been enjoying wonderful weather throughout.  Is it El Niño?  Just a particularly favorable position of the South Pacific high this season?  I dunno, but it's been great.

A few days ago, though, this beauty to the right rolled through.  That little green icon is the position of Galactic, at the southern end of Chiloé Island.

We were hoping to get a final round of fruit and veg at Quellón, the southernmost town on Chiloé, and then to use the northerlies ahead of the blow to cross the Boca de Guafos, the 30-mile stretch of open water between Chiloé and the start of Patagonia proper.

As it happened, the blow arrived a little too soon for that plan to work.  We consulted the graphical forecasts that we get via the radio, and thought we probably wouldn't try to beat the approaching low.  And then we saw the armada forecast and decided we definitely wouldn't.  They were calling for winds up to 50 knots, with gusts of 80 to 100.

That made sitting still seem the height of sensibility.

The magenta lines are our various tracks around
Chiloé so far.  Puerto Montt is at the top, and
the red target is where we are now, at Quellón

As the blow came through, we began to suspect that the armada forecast was dramatically over-calling the winds.  We hate to be dismissive of the local take on conditions, but we also began to grow skeptical of the numbers we were seeing.  Which is a shame, as we have/had great hopes for those forecasts as a source of info down south.

We left after the blow passed.  I fielded a long, mostly incomprehensible radio/phone conversation from the local armada, which involved a read-back of the now very out of date forecast, which was still calling for storm-force winds even though the low was long gone.  This armada radio operator was especially hard for me to understand, but it slowly dawned on me that the port was officially closed, and we weren't meant to be leaving.  Oops.

We got as far as Canal San Pedro, the southern-southernmost anchorage on Chiloé.  But the leaking transmission fluid that I noticed before we left Quellón turned out not to be a mirage.  We seem to have a bad lip seal, which means that we're glad that we didn't cross the Boca de Guafos after all.

So we're now back in Quellón, laying as low as we can re. the local armada, with whom we have had much lengthier interactions than I have recounted here...all of them convivial, I hasten to add.  I have some local knowledge indicating that we might be able to get a new seal here...I'll go ashore right now, and then we'll know.  We of course need to do whatever we can to ensure our self-suffiency down south...

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...

The Real Travel

My Spanish is improving.

It could have only gotten better, I suppose.

It is still a very utilitarian form of the tongue of Pablo Neruda that I employ.  I can go to the ferreterías, the hardware stores of Chile, and get through the multiple transactions involved (more on this below) without falling into the abyss of mutual incomprehension that so often plagued my earlier efforts in Valdivia.

It helps that these commercial interactions are so ritualized.  In the wide-open arena of conversation I am still an awkward player at the very best, though I have my moments of triumph when I can struggle through a little small talk with someone giving us a lift into town.

Now that we have left behind the practicalities of Puerto Montt and set out on the grand adventure that brought us to Chile, I'm struck how much the real travel is what occurs when you're preparing for something else, just like that old saw about life being the thing that happens when you're planning for what you think you're going to do.

The hardware stores here, like the wonderful Weitzler of Puerto Montt, are confusing dens for a visitor.  Most everything is behind the counter, so there's no browsing to see what might be on offer.  You have to ask for things by name - you know, in Spanish.

And then there is the way that the three floors of the larger store are divided into an array of sub-units, each with its staffed counter selling one class of goods - plumbing supplies, or hand tools, or fasteners, or whatever.  It's a picture of inefficiency to those of us who have been trained to expect US-style commerce.  The counter selling plastic sheeting will be out of favor, its two staff leaning on their elbows, bored, while the poor sods selling power tools are swarmed by a pocket of customers, each seeking their attention.

After you get to a clerk and order the things you want, you go to the caja to pay, and then to the empaque to pick up your goods.  If you're buying something big, you might have to go to the bodega out back.

Elias was my partner on these missions, and we'd come back to Galactic with a great assortment of odds and sods for a boat heading south: galvanized thimbles, plastic mesh to make deck containers for our shore lines, dielectric grease, acrylic to make the galley portlight double-paned, bungie cord for Elias' slingshot, a blowtorch to help the Perkins come to life on cold days, fifty meters of line for our crab pot, heat-tolerant fiberglass insulation to pack around our heater chimneys.

We searched for these items in stores where all the other customers knew the drill, knew where to go and how to ask, and if we came out of a store with two or three items from a list of ten we felt pretty lucky.  And then we'd wade through the streets of Puerto Montt to search out the little specialty shops that might fill out our haul before hopping on the Chinquihue bus back to the marina.

It doesn't sound like much, but these forays were a perfectly unstaged look at daily life in Chile.  Throughout it all we would never deal with someone in the tourist business.  And that, I would maintain, is the difference between tourism and travel.  In the short holidays of the former, it can be incredibly difficult to interact with someone who isn't in the business of dealing with foreigners - hotel clerk, tour guide, waiter, taxi driver.

Leaving Puerto Montt gave us an incredible lift of spirits, just as we knew it would.  An hour of being on your own boat, with your family, sailing to somewhere on this aqueous globe that you've never seen before - an hour of that goes so far to making the effort and expense of boat work seem worthwhile.

The endless sunshine of our February in Chiloé is gone, replaced by the more dramatic weather of autumn.

The barky set out to the south with a few obvious additions on deck - crab pot on the stern, replacement hard dinghy forward of the mast, and shore lines clustered around the granny bars.

The dinghy doesn't have a name yet, though there is a strong contender.  More on that soon.

Now that we're away, we're quite keen to get south - it will be the rare north wind that doesn't see us traveling.

All of the sailors in Puerto Montt who had come from the south seemed to agree that one of the great sailing adventures of the world lies before us.  We're heading to the Global South!  The southernmost towns in the world, all of the legendary destinations - Torres del Paine, the Land of Fire, the Falklands and South Georgia and Antarctica.

Many of those places we won't visit, but some of them we surely will.  We really have no idea how long we'll be staying in the south, though I proposed one idea to Alisa - maybe we should stay until the boys can speak Spanish.  That should give us a good year.

Meanwhile, we've stopped in the little port of Quemchi, on Chiloé Island, to find a welder to make us some oarlocks for the new dingher.  When we pulled in last night the local armada station hailed us on the VHF to quiz us about our intentions and various details about the boat.  This sort of thing is routine in Chile, where the armada has complete authority over all vessel movements in the country.  It's very easy to put up with as a visitor if you just think of it as a part of the cultural experience, though I'd find the same intrusiveness from the authorities completely insufferable in Australia, where I consider myself at home.

The good part, though, was the reaction I got from the armada officer.  I came back to his hail with "radio Quemchi, aqui yate Galactic, adelante," delivered in my best imitation of a Chilote fisherman's booming radio voice.

The armada officer couldn't keep the chuckle out of his voice when he told me to go to channel 14, already.  And in a funny way, that made my day.  He could understand me, but his laugh told me just how silly my accent must sound.

I'll Forbear, You Forbear

Readers of this blog will know that I find unnecessary discussion of boat maintenance to be boorish, and writing about it to be worse.

Stupidity may be the greatest sin for the general run of humanity (according to Oscar Wilde, I think?). But focusing on means, rather than ends, is the greatest sin both for sailing writers and for sailors in general.

Some people can write entertainingly about sailboat maintenance, but I don't even try.

So I'll just refer you to this picture to the right, vintage yesterday, from the engine room of Galactic.

That would be our engine, off its mounts and hanging on end.

I won't go into any details, of course.  I will forbear from over-sharing.

The crew, ready to go crabbing

And I would beseechingly ask for a response in kind.  If you are an editor at that leading sailing magazine for which I have resumed a bit of freelance work of late, and you are wondering when those excellent ideas that I pitched your way will turn into actual stories - please, forbear from asking.

Bits of the engine on deck in Puerto Montt

And if you are one of my science colleagues, wondering when I am going to come through with a promised bit of collaborative work - well, I'm sure I'm up to date on that front, without anything outstanding.  But if I've forgotten something, please forbear.

And, if you're a regular reader of the blog, perhaps someone who is nursing their own plans to follow the salty dream, and you're wondering when we're going to get to los canales already, wondering when the blog will be saturated with photos of the towering spires and ice-encumbered waters of Patagonia - well, they're coming.  A delightful Dutch/Spanish crew (the other crazy people heading South in the winter) just left Puerto Montt yesterday, and we hope to soon do the same.

Meanwhile, I'll offer some pics from the final days of our month in the Chiloé region to close:

Black-necked swan

South American sea lions - lobos de un pelo

Wing 'n wing and reefed down

Sunrise with forest fire smoke

Brothers

More soon.

Notes From Far Away

I love this picture of Elias.  It is a reminder of a great evening - a family barbecue at our last anchorage in continental Chiloé before we pointed it to the big smoke of Puerto Montt, the grungy fishing/aquaculture support port where we are preparing for the transition south.

Poor Elias, though - this picture invokes the wonderful parts of growing up on a traveling boat.  There is also this flip side, which is that the kids tend to take the blame when they're around any part of the boat when it happens to stop working.

Like the time he locked himself in the head.

It had already been a day rich in the sweet and sour mix that makes some days so memorable on the boat.  It was one of the most beautiful days we've had on the boat in quite a long time - see the picture below.


But beautiful days, and the blissed-out, I'm-so-grateful-we're-here sailors that they create, have their own special dangers.

Which is to say that "we" hit a rock soon after this picture was taken.

Normally I don't mind fessing up when I do something really dumb on the boat.  I'm very impressed by the continual danger that human error represents for people who are doing things like sailing their own boats across oceans, and I figure that talking about it is the first step to making us all smarter.  Or something like that.

But this one was just too much of a dunder-head move to confess to too publicly.  Luckily, 1) "we" recovered our wits quickly enough to make it a low-speed event, and 2) we have a steel boat.  I already posted a pic of the result here.

So we went on our way, though the vibe of the family as indomitable traveling team was at quite a low ebb.

And then we dropped the pick in a new spot, also very beautiful, and got ready to have lunch and forget all about the errors of the past, and suddenly Elias couldn't get out of the head.

Of course we blamed him for locking it and not being able to unlock it.  What kind of eight year old boat kid would do that!

Disassembling from the outside the lock didn't help.  Joking with Elias about how much more school work he would get done now that he would be living permanently in the head - that didn't work either.

Eventually I took Dremel and hacksaw to the deadbolt and managed to bust him loose.  And once I did that I was able to disassemble the lock completely, and discovered that an internal part had simply given up the ghost, in the process trapping an eight year old who happened to fiddle with the lock.

It was a day.

The place where all this occurred, Bahía Tictoc, was our southern-most point before we turned back north for Puerto Montt.  We made a few fruitless searches of Chiloé for our stolen dinghy on the way, we soaked ourselves in the hotsprings at Isla Llancahué, and before we knew it we were tying into the marina at Puerto Montt.

That's where the boat is now, though I am in California, spending a week at a National Science Foundation-funded center for ecological synthesis, working with a group that is trying to summarize what we know about the ecosystem effects of the Exxon Vadez oil spill.

As for Puerto Montt - well, there will be more about that later, I'm sure.  We've stacked up quite a few boat jobs for ourselves while we're there, as it's our last chance to get everything organized before we head South.  So there was the inevitable bit of port sickness when we arrived, as the mostly idyllic existence of wandering around on our own boat gave way to all of the deferred tasks that are necessary for keeping us going.

More to come.

Two Sides of Chiloé

The month of February, 2015 - it'll never come again.   (Once it's gone, that is, I'm anticipating by a couple days.)

We might have done any number of things with that month, but what we actually did was to explore Chiloé - both the east coast of Chiloé Island itself, as well as the outlying islands in the Golfo Corcovado and the mainland on the eastern shores of the Gulf.

The area has something of a split personality.  The picture above was taken in Quellon, a fishing town every bit as hard working and hard-scrabble as fishing towns usually are.  When we pulled into the anchorage crowded with work boats and beheld the grimy waterfront of the town itself I was moved to comment that traveling sailors coming in from the delights of the Gulf of Alaska probably feel a similar sort of deflation when they first see our beloved, though certainly grimy, Kodiak.

Once we were ashore, the view didn't improve.  We found an open sewer and drunks on the sidewalk. The buildings cried out for a coat of paint, the nice women running the empanada shop where we stopped for a bite were turning away yet more drunks who were looking for a feed.

We were in Quellon only for groceries and boots (for Elias, who had been doing without waterproof boots) and kept our stay short - one afternoon and the following morning, and then we were gone.  But it was one of those places that you just don't feel like visiting with a four year old who listens poorly.

On the other hand, I suppose that it was a valuable bit of education for Elias.  "Dad," he asked me as we passed a passed-out drunk on our way back to Smooches after our morning hit ashore, "why do some people have no money and other people so much?"

And further on that other hand, there was the toothless young fisherman who gave us a double handful of the clams he had laboriously collected himself with the help of a hookah.  And the women in the empanada shop who shared their own dinner of mussels with us.

The mariscos (shellfish) didn't thrill us - Alaskans can be such seafood snobs - but there remains nothing as touching as a spontaneous gift from someone who doesn't have much.

We fled Quellon for nearby Isla Cailín - with a mostly empty beach to walk on, which we enjoy very much, but still in cell phone range for me to communicate with some biology collaborators back in the States.

Even though Cailín was out of the impact zone that is Quellon, it was still on the same metaphorical side of the coin.  The bay was encumbered with aquaculture, as is every spare scrap of ocean around Chiloé  And the beach was thick with plastic trash, most of it from aquaculture and fishing boats, just like every beach in the area.

The ocean around Chiloé is made to work hard - people here are getting a buck out of the sea more so than any other place we've visited in the Pacific.  It's hard to get Alaskans to be polite about farmed salmon, and the one taste that I've had of the local farmed fish will be enough, thanks very much.  But on the other hand I love the bustle and energy of the local fishing fleets, and the warm reception that people working on the water give us.  I appreciate the value of the muscular livelihoods that are earned on the water here.

This picture of Eric above, and all the pictures below, were from the other side of the metaphorical coin - in this case Bahía Tictoc, our southernmost point on the mainland thus far.

This is the Chile that we came to see.  Where Chiloé features heavily modified agricultural landscapes, Tictoc offers native forests.  And where Chiloé is a place of people, Tictoc has exactly one inhabitant - the caretaker for the land owned by Douglas Tompkins, who has single-handedly set aside a huge chunk of land here for conservation.

We on Galactic don't need a huge chunk of land - just give us a deserted little scrap of rocky shoreline for the boys to scamper around, and perhaps a few new bird species for the family to identify, and we'll be happy as can be.

Tictoc was the very first place where we've tied into a Patagonian anchorage with shorelines - in Puerto Juan Yates, to be more specific.  We identified a new species of dolphin (Peale's) as we were motoring into the anchorage, we saw our first kelp geese there, and from the decks of Galactic we watched American mink diving to forage in the subtidal zone.

Once we were over in nearby Puerto Escondido we met said caretaker (Manuel?  Manuelo? I find it so hard to catch names), got a tour of the premises, and Elias finally found his Chilean angling mojo, catching dinner for the whole family.

There's lots more of that sort of anchorage to come.

Through it all, of course, the rigors and vicissitudes of life on a traveling boat are never far away... 

Keepin' on

Any day you see penguins is a good day.  These are Magellanic penguins,
Spheniscus magellanicus

It's only really travel if you're on a roller coaster.  There have to be the heady highs and, inevitably, the Stygian lows that keep them company.  I first learned that when I was traveling by bus through Ethiopia with my bestest mate, Linus, all these many years ago.

Estero Pailad had plenty of surprises.  Here I'm
plucking a spawner out of the sea chest -
there were lots more where this one came from

Having the Little Dipper taken off us was a low.  We're pretty good about not being attached to possessions, and there was only a little of the inevitable self-blame.  (Why did we stop hanging the dinghies every night?)  But mostly, we (I) feel for the blow to the ship's operations.  You might call it a luxury to have two dinngers (we still have Smooches, our éminence grise of an Achilles).  But aside from the convenience of being a two-car family and having a boat that was great for Elias to operate on his own, we quite like the redundancy of a second tender for the waters where we plan to operate over the next year or so.  The Little Dipper had beed our planned go-to for rowing lines ashore in the caletas of Patagonia.

Scanning Estero Pailad for a dinghy that we know is
well and truly gone 

Ah, well.  We did have a bit of a compensatory up when we first went ashore to look for any signs of the missing boat and stumbled upon an extended family from Santiago, about to enjoy a mid-afternoon repast of lamb roasted over an open fire.  They immediately welcomed us into their gathering, pressing beer and wine on us and insisting we should stay to eat with them.  Quite remarkably hospitable people, whose easy friendship we weren't quite in the mood to enjoy.

Despite whatever lows come your way, it is vitally important on a traveling boat to develop the capacity to just keep going, metaphorically and actually.  When we bought Pelagic, I remember the sellers, Q and Tatty, telling us that even when things just seemed too hard, we should keep going.

They were talking about the work of keeping a traveling boat in good nick, but the same thing applies to this sort of situation.  So the day after we lost the Little Dipper, we picked up the hook and headed down to the fishing town of Quellon.

How Alisa and Elias sail to weather

How Eric does

We had a bit of a bash to windward to get there - two reefs in the main and all that.  But after we'd tacked back towards Chiloé and the wind-against-tide action had mellowed out a bit, Eric recovered his wits enough to point behind us and say, "Look, that volcano is erupting."

See the plume on the left?

And, he was right.  One of the peaks on the horizon was having a grumpy.

Eric was so pleased that he had been the one to spot it.  And for me, it was this powerful moment of realization, a moment that brought home to me how far we've traveled over the last year or so, and what a remarkable place we've reached.  A place where your four-year-old can look over the stern of the family home and spot an erupting volcano in the Andes.

Too cool, that.

And finally, this parting shot.  The Little Dipper in happier days, Amanu Atoll, the Tuamotus, 2014.
Sic transit gloria and all that

d' Islands

That's where we are - the red oval is more or less over the east side of Chiloé Island

Locals row; visitors row, too

Chiloé Island - it's just famous enough that we'd heard of it before we arrived.  Bruce Chatwin, a few glowing reports from friends who have been here before us - it was enough that this place was on our radar as somewhere significant to visit.

North of us is Valdivia and the long unprotected west coast of South America.  South of us is the vast abyss of the Patagonian canales, where untold adventures await and winter approaches.

And we're here, in this happy middle ground, where we can cut our teeth on navigating Chile.

We're traveling a little blind - nothing much to read beyond the comments in the "Italian Book", as the go-to pilot for sailing Patagonian waters is universally referred to.  We have whatever the Lonely Guide to South America has to say about the place, but when I read other Lonely Guides, describing places I know well, I always come away with the impression that the first (and only) draft of the context material was written in crayon.  So we haven't looked there.

(Biggest apologies to the Lonely author we actually know, and a note that their Tasmanian guide is rock-solid.)

So we're just following our noses, developing our own extremely idiosyncratic picture of this place, based on the sights we stumble upon and our random interactions with locals.  The fishermen are certainly friendly.   And I continue to reap the cachet of having fished one season for Bering Sea red king crab.

We started our sojourn with George - scion of the Harcha clan, and I'm sure fated to be the only genuine Chilean politician whom we will ever have on the boat.

Hosting George gave us some great insight into Chile, and it was very instructive to see how he cajoled the reluctant owner of a cocinería - a small restaurant in someone's home - into cooking us dinner.

George Harcha Uribe earns his passage

Palafitos - houses built on stilts over the water, Mechuque Island

This picture reminded Alisa of Alaska.  We're wearing Xtra-tuffs and Carharrts…and there are no kids in sight!

Cocinería

Dalcahue is something of a South American theme park

After all of our mental, and physical, preparations for the gelid weather of Patagonia, this February in Chiloé has been a wonderful interlude.  We're in baking sunshine day after day, missing the shade of the bimini that I packed away in Valdivia, sure that it was something we wouldn't want in Chile.

We'll miss easy weather soon enough.  But for right now, it's giving our time in Chiloé a delightful, languid feel.  The days are endless, the livin' is easy, and there is always a nice estero just a few miles away where we can drop the pick.  We haven't done so much island hopping - Apiao and Mechuque and Lemuy and Quehui, not to mention Chiloé itself - in I don't know how long.  There are a few Chilean sailboats about, and even fewer foreign yachts, and we're having the great experience of knocking around a new country without living in the parallel expat world that you get in places that are swarmed by foreign yachts.

All in all, it's no bad.

Chilote

Salmonera

Sailor in port