The weather comes through this anchorage in waves. First it’s a scene of summer idyll, the water and sky purest blue. Then dark clouds gather, making us wonder if there will be another hailstorm. The wind pauses here for an hour, or half a day, and then it comes again, screaming and running from the west.

The two islands protecting this spot are covered in low heath. Even in December, the middle of Southern Hemisphere summer, the vegetation is strangely the colors of Christmas — blood red and conifer green. No trees grow anywhere. There are sheep ashore, and cattle that run at the sight of us, and penguins that bray like donkeys.

My wife, Alisa, motions at the scene around Galactic, our 45-foot cutter — the thick beds of kelp, the elephant seals fighting on the beach with their weird moans and growls that carry so far. “Where are we?” she asks, with a kind of helpless amazement.

Alisa knows where we are literally, of course. We’re anchored between Barren and George islands, on the south side of the Falkland Islands. She’s referring to how unbridgeably different this place is from anywhere else we’ve been. And I understand just what she means. This kelp-infested, windy, lonely anchorage does a good impression of the end of the world.

We’ve been stuck here for days, waiting for the westerly wind to die. There are no other people around. And we — Alisa and I, and our sons Elias, 9, and Eric, 5 — are as happy as we can be. Before this visit, the Falklands were just another place that was indistinct on my mental map of the world, vaguely remembered from the war between England and Argentina in the 1980s and inconveniently located for a visit by sailboat. But now that we’re here, we’re discovering that the Falklands are a place from an earlier era, when the cruising scene was smaller, sailors visiting new places had the chance to discover them on their own and locals saw the arrival of a cruising boat as an event worth noting.

RELATED: Penguins in the Falklands

When we first arrived at Stanley, the capital and only town of any real size in the Falklands, we rafted up to three other sailboats tied to the working dock. These were all charter boats, mostly carrying passengers from the Falklands to Antarctica or South Georgia. The Falklands have long been an afterthought for visiting sailboats — a place to stop after rounding Cape Horn, or a launching-off place for the far south. Few boats have time, in the short southern ­s­ummer, to explore the Falklands themselves.

But when Galactic set out from Stanley, we had the month of December in hand to do nothing more than sail around the Falklands. We left on a day when the wind was absent, and we took the chance to make easy miles to the west with the motor, traveling along a flat and featureless coastline. Looking at the chart that day gave me ample opportunity to consider one of the great challenges of Falklands sailing: the legendary kelp. The chart indicated thick beds of kelp extending from every shore in a profusion that seemed like some kind of a joke. A closer look at some of the bays made me wonder where we would even sail, the open water appearing to be so scarce.

But as is the case with so many challenges of the sailing life, the kelp turned out to be more trouble in the anticipation than in the actual event. Kelp floats, after all, and so is easy to avoid. Better, kelp grows from rocks, so submerged dangers in the Falklands are helpfully marked by fronds of kelp. As we approached our first anchorage of the trip I began thinking of the kelp beds as a shadow shoreline that was more important to navigation than the actual land, and everything went fine.

The other thing for sailors to get used to in the Falklands is the wind. Twenty-five knots of wind just seems like more in the Falklands than it does in other places. And the wind often doesn’t satisfy itself with only blowing 25. Even after the year we had just spent in Patagonia, the gale that visited our first Falklands anchorage was an impressive thing. The muddy water of the inlet foamed and slapped around us. Galactic swung side to side and heeled over in the gusts. Not for the last time in the Falklands, we were quite happy with our large anchor.

That first blow lasted only for a day. But after we reached George and Barren islands, the westerlies set in as a part of those waves of weather that contributed to the end-of-the-world impression. A half day of fine weather would inevitably be followed by another blast of wind — wind that accelerated down the leeward slope of the Andes to rampage across the sea to the Falklands.

We were stuck in that anchorage for a week. These were the Furious 50s of southern latitudes, after all, and we weren’t surprised at persistent strong westerlies. Nor were we tempted to cross Falkland Sound, between East and West Falkland islands, until the west wind stopped blowing. Our determination to wait out the weather was helped by the fact that three of Galactic’s lower shrouds had broken strands, courtesy of our time in Patagonia and what was, in retrospect, undersize rigging. We had backed up the failing wire with a jury rig to keep the mast in place until we could return to Stanley to claim the replacement rigging that was coming from England on a ship.

We didn’t see another soul for the week that we waited, and that solitude made the remarkable natural history of the place seem like a gift that had been given to our family alone. Sea lions took every appearance of our dinghy as an invitation to play and would come charging out from the beach to see which of them could get closest to us. We watched elephant seals mock fight on the beach from only 30 yards away. Long walks on Barren and George islands showed us Magellanic penguins braying from their burrows and oystercatchers trying to distract us from their nests. A Johnny rook, the famously mischievous hawk of the Falklands, swooped down and grabbed Alisa’s hat right from her head.

Visitors in the Falklands should request permission before going ashore on remote properties, and we had been in email contact with the May family, the owners of the wonderful islands we were rambling around. When we shifted to Speedwell Island, their home island, we caught up with the Mays and had our first experience of out-island hospitality. We anchored off the Speedwell settlement and went ashore to say hello, and found ourselves suddenly in their comfortable house, ­having tea with the extended ­family. The only tension, or comedy, in the moment came with the sartorial transition from high-­latitude cruising to sipping tea in a stranger’s kitchen. Alisa apologized for her outfit as she pulled off her boots and rain gear and found herself having tea in her rainbow-striped long underwear — warm and comfortable, no doubt, but not quite the get-up for introducing yourself.

When the weather turned good, it turned good with a vengeance. A flat-calm day saw Galactic motoring across Falkland Sound to Albemarle, the 40,000-acre farm run by the Mays’ son. Here we were again met with spontaneous generosity and good company. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay, as the Falklands is no place to waste a fair wind. A day of brilliant sailing took us around the southern corner of West Falkland Island, where increasingly dramatic sea cliffs shone improbably in the sun. To the boys’ delight, gentoo penguins porpoised next to Galactic, and leaping Peale’s dolphins guided us into our anchorage.

The next morning, as we were charging out of the anchorage with a reefed main, we heard a familiar voice hailing us on the VHF. It was our friend Leiv Poncet on Peregrine, his rugged 37-foot cutter, returning to his home on Beaver Island after a charter trip taking biologists to an albatross colony. Leiv was our reason for visiting the Falklands, and his home on Beaver Island, at the far western edge of the group, had been a much-wondered-about destination of ours for years. It was a treat to sail to Beaver in company with Leiv, and a rare treat indeed — he later told us that it was the first time he could remember coming across another sailboat outside of Stanley.

While Leiv dropped his passengers at nearby New Island, we went ashore on Beaver to look around. From a rocky hilltop above the settlement, we had a clear view of the fascinating landscape of the far western Falklands. Moor-covered hills were interspersed with interlocking waterways of the clearest blue. Straight below us were the scattered buildings of the settlement, deeply weathered wooden structures out of another era. Hauled up above the high-tide line was the equally weathered Damien II, the famous 50-footer that Leiv’s parents, Jérôme and Sally, used to pioneer Antarctic cruising. A few sheep scampered in the foreground. And over the entire scene … there was silence. There were no boats traveling in the channels, and no roads on the outer islands. There was no evidence of human activity beyond the settlement below our feet. Our family of traveling Alaskans felt instantly at home.

We had met Leiv during a winter Galactic and Peregrine spent in Tasmania. Over shared dinners we heard stories about his home on Beaver Island and the singlehanded Southern Ocean voyage that had brought him to Tasmania. Leiv reminded us of our favorite commercial fishermen in Alaska — people who are hugely competent on the water, and don’t feel any need to show off about it. Leiv was clearly someone to listen to when the subject was sailing in the global south, and he was an eminently likable guy. We hit it off.

When spring came, Leiv set off for home — a nonstop passage from New Zealand to the Falklands via Cape Horn. His parting words stayed with me, a spell of an invitation from one sailor to another. “Come to Beaver Island,” he said. “I’ll give you all the mutton and reindeer that you can eat. You can dry out alongside our jetty to work on Galactic, and I’ve got an old Perkins 4108 that you can raid for spare parts.” Later that spring we left too, and began to follow Leiv, very slowly. It turns out that there are a lot of places between Tasmania and the Falklands where it’s worthwhile to linger. When we finally reached the Falklands, it had been almost three years since we’d seen Leiv.

Leiv turned out to be a man of his word. The tone for our visit to Beaver was set on the first day, when Leiv casually asked our boys if we should go out and shoot a reindeer. The island is home to a herd descended from animals that Norwegian whalers introduced to South Georgia Island.

The boys were delighted to find themselves in the back of a Land Rover, driving on off-road tracks and looking for reindeer. Galactic has been to any number of places where the boys have been told that they shouldn’t touch this or disturb that. Beaver Island is a working farm — unique in that its income comes both from sheep and from charter sailboats, Damien II and Jérôme’s more recent Golden Fleece. It was a revelation to our boys. After living their whole lives on a sailboat, all their romantic notions of land life were being confirmed.

That evening on the beach, Leiv grilled us all the mutton chops we could eat. He showed Eric and Elias how to catch and cook minnows from the settlement creek, and how to pluck the geese that we ate for Christmas dinner. He taught the boys to harvest the succulent hearts of the tussac grass that grew on the island, and he took them to catch mullet for the smoke house.

Alisa set up shop in the settlement kitchen, and she and Leiv started canning jar after jar of mutton and reindeer to see Peregrine and Galactic through the long sea miles ahead. While Galactic would soon be off for South Georgia and South Africa, Leiv would be setting off on an epic solo adventure to our home waters in Alaska.

Leiv had delivered on his first promise, and he soon delivered on the other two. We’d been losing a battle with a troublesome holding tank on Galactic, and it was time for it to come out. I hoped I could make the job less noisome if the boat was out of the water. So on the day after Christmas, Galactic duly tied up on the jetty to go dry on the tide. As a measure of just how important scrounging and recycling are when you’re maintaining boats in an out-of-the-way place, consider that Leiv gave every indication of being happy to put our used holding tank on the Beaver Island scrap heap against the day when it might come in handy. In exchange, he pulled out his old Perkins, the victim of a fire on Peregrine, and soon valuable bits of the engine were tucked away on Galactic.

The time came for us to continue our circumnavigation of the archipelago. The southern summer would only be so long, and we had plans for the rest of it. We’ve left plenty of islands with a bunch of bananas hanging from the stern arch, but this was the first time we’d ever left an island with a leg of mutton hanging from the rigging — a parting gift from Leiv. And we came away with a more memorable gift. One of the great joys of our life on Galactic is the remarkable people whom we’ve been lucky enough to call our friends; the great downside is the way our constant motion means we’ll likely never see most of them again. Our visit to Beaver Island was a chance to reconnect with a sailing friend on his remarkable home turf. In the midst of the wandering that would soon see Peregrine and Galactic on opposite sides of the Earth, we had each come to rest at the same time, in a splendid corner of the world, to catch up with each other’s news. That was a highlight of our sailing lives.

Of course, there was plenty more to discover during the rest of our sail around the Falklands. There was the sailing itself, which, in spite of our parted shrouds, gave us many days of delight and easy travel. There was the fantastic wildlife. We had other elephant seal haulouts to discover, and albatross and penguin colonies where our family could sit just a few yards from an incredible concentration of avian life to watch the show. And there was the way that the islands seemed to glow on a midsummer day, in the heartbreaking colors of the unpolluted far south.

But, for all the physical delights of the place, it was the people who made the Falklands. There was the hospitality of Leiv, who took the time at the busy peak of summer to show us around his island, and who always had a patient answer for our boys’ endless questions. There was the May family, inhabitants of remote farms who made visiting strangers instantly welcome. But even on the busier islands that play host to cruise-ship passengers, we found that it was impossible to go ashore without sitting down for tea and cookies, and in the relative bustle of Stanley we found more kindness than I could relate here. People are the soul of cruising, just like they’re the soul of any travel. Is it any wonder that we left the Falklands thinking we’d found the best cruising in the world?

– – –

At press time the Litzows were back in their home port of Kodiak, Alaska, after completing a 10-year, 65,000-mile voyage. Get in touch with Mike and his family at thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

The post Friends at the Ends of the Earth appeared first on Cruising World.

My wife, Alisa, and I were determined not to make bad weather the focus of our trip to Patagonia. But there was one night when the conditions lived up to their reputation. Galactic, our 45-foot steel cutter, was swinging at anchor in Puerto Natales, halfway down the 900 miles of fjords that make up Chilean Patagonia. Puerto Natales is on the inland side of the Andes, where we found the dry grasslands of pampas instead of the dripping rainforest of the coast. Sailing around Natales was just like sailing around Colorado — if Colorado had salt water, flamingos, and more dramatic mountains and glaciers.

But Puerto Natales has no well-protected anchorage. The famous Patagonia & Tierra del Fuego Nautical Guide, more commonly called the “Italian guide,” which is the definitive reference for sailing Patagonia, calls the anchoring situation there “just a step short of tragic.” And being inland of the Andes means that Natales is also subject to winds that come screaming down mountain slopes to surprise visiting sailors.

We had just put our boys, Elias and Eric, to bed. Without warning, winds began funneling over the Andes and into the open anchorage. A routine night on the hook suddenly turned into something beyond our experience in eight years of full-time sailing.

We rushed to get our dinghy on deck and deflated as the winds began to howl in the rig. And then conditions became completely unreasonable. Galactic was knocked from side to side in the dark night, taking punches of wind so violent that Alisa wondered whether the mast would touch the water. We were caught out with only 4-to-1 scope as the water started foaming and spraying around us, and our trusty 88-pound Rocna dragged a tenth of a mile before we got another anchor in the water. And we were the lucky ones. The 70-foot commercial boat anchored next to us was blown out of the anchorage completely.

This is the kind of story that comes to mind when you think of Patagonia, right? Paint-peeling winds, driving rain, pitiless conditions?

What if I mentioned that this happened in mid-June, just as the southern winter was locking down, and that we were about to head farther south in the very heart of winter, down into the far reaches of Tierra del Fuego. Our conditions would be cataclysmic, right?

Well, no. First of all, winter in Patagonia is a not-so-secret golden season, when the polar high extends over the southern tip of South America, bringing long spells of settled conditions.

But Patagonia also suffers from a reputation problem. The need to tell a good story has created an outsize picture of the challenges involved. Alisa and I read a lot of tales about sailing Patagonia before we arrived, and too many of them read as accounts by self-styled “expert sailors” who wanted us to know they were dealing with “extreme conditions.” Their stories began to seem like endless repetitions of “Patagonia: It’s really windy!” Surely, we thought, there must be more to it than that.

Luckily, we were right. Occasionally rotten weather is a part of Patagonia, sure, but it isn’t the essence of the place. That essence has more to do with qualities such as stillness, majesty and solitude. Experiencing these aspects of Patagonia from the deck of your own boat is still one of the great adventures to be had on the planet. And by doing the trip in the winter, we doubled down on that adventure. Going in winter gave us solitude in anchorage after anchorage. We went months without meeting another cruising boat. And winter turned a place that is persistently gray in the summer into a crystalline wonderland of blue skies and frosty white mountains.

The wind raged for three hours that night in Natales, and then was suddenly gone. Alisa and I were both a little dazed by the experience, and impressed at how our two boys, who have spent their entire lives at sea, could sleep through the nautical uproar. Completely unwilling to trust the weather at that point, we stood anchor watches until drowsiness and dull calm convinced us it was OK to sleep.

The next day, the harbor was mirror-calm. But when I went to the Armada de Chile, the Chilean navy, to request a zarpe, the paperwork that would give us permission to continue southward,

I learned that the port was still closed and no departures were allowed. Bureaucracy hadn’t caught up with the change in conditions. I was told the port would be closed a day or two more. And no, I couldn’t have a zarpe until it was open.

In Patagonia the weather might not be that bad, but the bureaucracy can require your most determined go-with-the-flow attitude.

Eventually, the armada officer agreed to give me a zarpe on the off chance that the port might be open the next day. This made me as pleased with my improving Spanish as it did at getting a little concession from officialdom.

When we left Natales, the whole crew was gripped with the excitement of heading farther south. We already had enough snow to let the boys make snowmen on deck, and that first taste of real winter made us eager for more.

Leaving Natales, we transited the narrows of Angostura White, where the tidal currents can run 10 knots. The excellent current tables produced by the armada saw us through safely, and Galactic was soon tied into Caleta Mousse, a perfect little cove, or caleta, tucked into the base of a mountain wall. Only a day from the relative bustle of Natales, this was a place that gave us everything we had dreamed of in Patagonia. Dolphins played in the caleta, Andean condors soared over the high mountains across the fjord, there was good hiking through the Dr. Seuss-like vegetation on the hillside above us, and we had a perfectly sheltered nook where Galactic could wait out a few days of driving snow while held in place by four lines tied to massive trees.

Anchorages like Caleta Mousse are the key to Patagonia. There are hundreds of little coves where the deep water allows a cruising boat to tie securely to the trees, often only a few feet from the shore. With high trees blocking the wind, and shorelines fore and aft, there is nothing in the weather that can bother a boat tied in to points onshore in these places.

But getting in and out of such protected spots is when things can go awry.

And so it was when we tried to leave Caleta Mousse. The morning was calm. I started rowing around the anchorage, untying our lines from the trees while Alisa and Elias pulled them to Galactic. With the lines retrieved, we started to pull the anchor.

It was then that we realized the shape of the mountain wall west of the caleta was perfect for pulling the wind down into the anchorage. All we knew on this morning was that when the anchor was just about up, we were suddenly hit by williwaws that made the water smoke. Alisa quickly spooled out chain, but it was no good. There wasn’t enough room to swing. We needed shore lines again.

I jumped into the dinghy and rowed like a madman to the upwind side of the caleta, a shore line tied around my waist. Once I had finally tied us off to a tree I looked back in relief. And then I saw a sight that made all my confidence evaporate, a sight that turned all my dreams of sailing through Patagonia into so much fluff blowing in the breeze.

A williwaw had Galactic in its teeth and wasn’t letting go. I stared at the underbody of our floating home while the mast leaned over at a crazy angle. Surely we weren’t so close to the shore that the masthead was over the rocks? Alisa was desperately trying to power into the wind blast. She was trapped at the wheel and unable to go up to the bow to tie off the shore line that would solve all of our problems.

It was only for a moment, but that moment stretched out in the suspense of what might happen. Standing there on the beach, the adrenaline of the row ebbing from my veins, I felt my shoulders slump at the knowledge that I was nothing but a spectator. For that one moment, I just stood on the beach and watched whatever would happen, happen.

Of course, the williwaw passed, and Alisa soon had the shore line tied off. We agreed that we would have to be more cautious about picking our moments to leave anchorages. And Alisa reported to me, with some wonder in her voice, that through it all the boys hadn’t evinced any kind of worry. They had been down below, laughing their heads off and cheering the wind on to give them a better ride.

Complete ignorance at what might really go wrong — it must be one of the greatest blessings of childhood. And our determination to see Patagonia as more than a series of confrontations with outrageous conditions? That was getting a little threadbare.

When the weather forecast was ideal, we pulled the shore lines and slid out of Puerto Profundo at first light. In the weeks since we left Natales, I had become intoxicated with how sailing through Patagonia was such a linear adventure. It wasn’t at all like the incredibly open spaces that we were used to from the Pacific. We were always hemmed in on two sides by mountain walls, so the only decision open to us was whether to move forward or go back. Which was no decision at all. We traveled farther and farther south. The days grew shorter with every passing mile, and the scenery grew more and more splendid. The sailing was fantastic, with a scrap of jib being all that was needed to see us speeding along on the prevailing northwest wind. On Galactic, family life slowed down as we found the natural pace of living through the long nights of winter without any of the distractions of the Internet or television to dilute our experience of the place and the season. I was in heaven.

And things were about to get even better. From Puerto Profundo we motored into the Strait of Magellan. As we made the turn into the western entrance, the sun cleared the clouds to illuminate the snowy mountains on either side of us. Who couldn’t feel the moment? We were at the very spot where Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to sail into the Pacific and, finding it on the same sort of calm day that we were enjoying, gave it the name that we all know it by.

That night we tied in at Puerto Angosto, where Joshua Slocum anchored Spray during his first solo circumnavigation of the globe. Slocum was at Angosto for something like a month, and made six unsuccessful attempts to set off from that spot before the weather let him get away.

We were sailing legendary waters.

The eastern Strait of Magellan is a nightmare of huge tides, exuberant winds and few good anchorages. After Magellan made it through the strait, attempt after attempt to repeat his route failed. Luckily, cruising boats can leave the strait around Cabo Froward, the southernmost point of continental South America, and continue along the fjords into the Land of Fire — Tierra del Fuego. We followed that path, and found we had the whole spectacular cruising grounds pretty much to ourselves. There were a few fishing boats around, and every morning we came up on the Patagonia cruisers SSB net and emailed our position to the armada. But even with those occasional reminders of the rest of humanity, our family mostly seemed to be carrying our own envelope of solitude around with us, from anchorage to anchorage, through crystal day after crystal day.

The snow line came down to the sea. The mountainous islands through which we traveled were majestic, remote and polar. Each anchorage was mysterious, and a study in ice and snow and cold when compared to our expectations of what a normal cruising anchorage should look like. The best anchorages were surrounded by hills where the family could walk in the snow and build snowmen, and the boys could indulge in the ­limitless joy of throwing snowballs at their captain and generally causing a ruckus.

After we entered Canal Beagle, conditions seemed to be building to more and more delirious levels of thrills. Our destination of Puerto Williams, Chile, the southernmost town in the world, was less than 100 miles away. With every mile, the sailing got wilder, the mountain scenery more spectacular. It felt like we might reach takeoff before the trip ended, might attain some otherworldly plateau of sailing adventure that we couldn’t have imagined before we set off but which became obvious, even inescapable, to us now. Fully half of the anchorages we investigated were frozen over, and we got used to the sound of ice grinding against our hull at night with a change in wind or tide. Turning a corner with Galactic might bring us face to face with a cathedral of glacial ice spilling over mountain buttresses to the sea.

And then the day arrived when we came out of the metaphorical cold. After months of wandering on our own, we called the Puerto Williams armada on the VHF to give notice of our arrival. We pulled into the “uttermost yacht club in the world,” a 1930s-era freighter named Micalvi that has been scuttled in a shallow inlet to make a clubhouse and dock for visiting sailboats. We found about 40 boats rafted to the ship, most of them left for the winter while their owners flew home. Our arrival bumped the number of inhabited boats to six. We found ourselves immersed in a warm social scene of like-minded people who shared the bonds of common experience.

I can’t say enough about choosing winter for our first visit to the far south. Winter makes everything lonely and mysterious, the way Patagonia should be. We approached the whole undertaking with humility. We were confident, but we assumed nothing. We prepared adequately, and we consciously worked at making good decisions. Our goal was to make it look easy, with as few close shaves or harrowing tales as possible. And more than that, we wanted to have a blast. We wanted Patagonia in winter to be a really good time.

That part worked. The kids had a blast. Alisa had a blast. I had a blast.

And the sense of moving through the out-of-the-way corners of Patagonia independently? The feeling of choosing our pace and taking responsibility for everything? The relish of dreaming about a trip like this and then doing it, and finding ourselves equal to it?

It’s no wonder people find the sailing life so hard to give up.

• • •

At press time, the Litzows were crossing the Pacific, en route to Hawaii. You can follow the family and their travels aboard Galactic at www.thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

The post Sailing Patagonia in The Winter appeared first on Cruising World.

The Thing With Pictures

Days like this, you don’t get pictures of.

We arrived in Puerto Natales late yesterday, just in time to sniff out a place of rest in this notoriously un-welcoming anchorage. The Italian Guide, with a poetic flourish, calls the anchoring situation here “just a step short of tragic”.

When we woke this morning, our solution to the anchoring puzzle from last night wasn’t looking too good. Onshore breeze (light), half a meter of water under the keel.

So Alisa and Elias (yes! a helpful little deckhand these days) and I spent the morning untying the cat’s cradle we’d woven the night before. Shorelines aboard, stern hook up, except that it was set so hard I couldn’t budge it from Fernando with the trip line; so bow hook up first, then stern hook pulled with the windlass, doing the dance between anchors with that shore just downwind of us.

We did all that without taking a single picture. Just like we took no pictures during the afternoon filled with the traveler’s chores of armada paperwork (the bit of piping that attaches the armada guy’s pistol to his body, and why is it only the guy at the front desk who is always armed?), food run (a thousand pesos for the taxi to drive through the gate to the fisherman’s dock? we’ll shlep), and propane fill-up (clouds of white vapor collecting around legs of the voluble woman, queen of all that she surveys in her backyard propane emporium, as she decants cooking gas into our foreign cylinders). Days like this stretch and surprise you, and the memories last. But somehow I never end up with pictures of these days.

Now that we’re in Natales, we also have access to the internet. So, after that intro on what sort of pictures you don’t get, here is a story told through the ones we did.

So, two things strike me at this point. First, this is such a linear adventure. It’s not like crossing the Pacific, when you travel across incredibly open spaces. Here you’re always hemmed in on two sides, with only the decision of going forward or going back. Which is no decision at all. So it becomes quite intoxicating, this forever traveling southwards, waiting to see what the next day will bring.

The second thing is that this is such a democratic adventure. A lot of boats come here, and from what we’ve seen they’re pretty average sorts of boats for the most part. Whatever the drawbacks of our age, we do live at a time when it doesn’t take a Tilman. Any Jane and Joe can come here and have their own adventure.

And if you want to escape the maddening crowds, you can just come in the winter.

Family Affair

The last time we picked ice out of the water was in the very first two weeks after we left Kodiak – perilously close to eight years ago. Someone gave us the local knowledge to get through the sill into the upper part of Northwestern Fjord in the Kenai Fjords. What did we know back then of using a laptop as a plotter? In front of the glacier, I used our landing net to pick some ice out of the water for G&Ts that night. Elias watched from the cockpit in his snow suit, gumming on the end of a sheet.

We just spent two days knocking around the floating ice of Estero Peel. This time there was no need for me to do the ice netting. Elias was mad for the sport – patiently waiting on the bow with his net, and then charging along the side decks to chase down any small piece that came alongside. He and Eric ate the stuff – bit right into it and chomped it on down. I couldn’t watch. They also had some glacier ice in a celebratory juice, and Alisa and I had scotch on the rocks for two nights in a row.

Not incidentally, both boys were ecstatic with our experience of being around the ice. “This is the best day of my life” has a certain honesty to it when it comes from the mouth of a five-year-old. They can presumably remember most of them at that point.

Many of the anchorages so far have offered zero walking opportunity. The terrain is too steep, and the forest too thick – this is something that we expected based on our experience with fjords in Alaska. But enforced time on the boat has really weighed on the boys over the last few weeks – especially Eric, who has a younger kid’s need to run and scream, and less of an eight-year-old’s ability to cerebralize his way through a day spent inside.

But when it’s good for the kids – when there’s ice in the water, or when the clouds part to reveal glaciated peaks above us, or when Caleta Tilman gives us the terrain for a walk – at those times, near-freezing rain is no barrier at all to their enjoyment. The revel in the moment, they scream out the news of their happiness. After Estero Peel we came into Puerto Bueno, which gave us our first taste of real upland walking, a close view of culpeo, the fox, and our first taste of centolla, the king crab of Patagonia. (It was a female and we ate it anyway. Standards are slipping.) We seem to be on an upwards trajectory in terms of getting off the boat, and we expect that to continue all the way south.

And, during all the long days that we’ve spent together, we’ve hit a certain sweet spot in family life. Lots of games of Uno while the diesel stove heats the saloon, lots of time for me to listen to Elias go on and on about his make-believe world, No-Cars Planet, time for me to look at Eric across the saloon and to notice how his face is maturing and how tall he is getting, and to remember how recently it was that I was telling Alisa I was enjoying the experience of having a three-year-old again. Except that now he’s five.

The Old Man Was Here

On the day we crossed into the 50s south latitude we saw our first ice. Floating bits that had calved from the glaciers at the head of Seno Penguin had just made it to Canal Wide before melting away completely and they gave the boys no end of delight. I jibed to get us a closer view before calling them up to deck. They oohed and ahhed and then after they went back to their lessons I hand steered through the field of little floaty bits that the jibe had brought across our path. I realized that a crew more used to ice would likely have just let the autopilot steer a ruler’s course through this inconsequential scattering but I was happy with the novelty and also happy not to find out how big a “thump” these little things might make if we hit them.

One of the delights of our trip is the number of giant petrels that we’ve found in the canales. I wonder if that isn’t just a winter occurrence. Not vast flocks of them but often a single one wheeling around the ship, three or four or five of them in the course of the day. These improbable-looking giants have become my favorite pelagic seabird and their presence in this inland setting gives the canales an extra touch of grandeur. As if they needed it.

On the day we saw that first ice we sailed down Canal Concepción in the company of blowing whales. There appeared to be two species, both with strongly falcate dorsal fins and one of them very small – much shorter than Galactic, for instance. We were near the open sea and the weather was coming in waves, clear followed by sharp and foul. The mountains around us were cyclically revealed, gauzed over in the mist, and hidden completely. On our starboard we had an island called Madre de Dios which should give an idea of the scope of the scenery. Each one of those islands might produce an enjoyable fortnight of exploration for a yacht in no hurry to be somewhere else.

We came screaming around Isla Canning going ever so fast as we chose, the acceleration where the wind funneled by the canal made the turn around the island giving us all the breeze we could need. Running backstay set up firm, jib half rolled in. We saw our first honest-to-goodness williwaw lifting water off the surface of Canal Andres just downwind of our selected anchorage and elected to make the final approach under engine alone. The anchorage was perfectly snug, a little slot in the rock not much wider than a marina berth. We ended up with a comfortable four-point tie though not without the exertion of myself scrambling up slopes of mixed moss and branch to make the tie onto a stout trunk and Alisa finding herself in command of the ship when it very nearly laid up against the trees at the side of the berth, ten meters of depth being available directly below the outermost dripping branches.

We took a weather day and on the morning we left sighted a full-grown centolla in about four meters of water on the rocky bench just next to us. We have yet to taste the king crab of Patagonia and so, scarce propane be damned, Alisa and Elias set out in Fernando to effect the capture with a landing net lashed to a boat hook for the event.

It was a close thing, but in the end all they caught was long faces.

As we continued southwards I became convinced that I could see the snow line coming closer with every mile we traveled. We are on half rations of propane and so a warm breakfast and lunch and endless cuppas are not among our consolations in the wet and cold. Alisa though is a champ about giving the on-deck crew the lion’s share of the hot water from the thermos and Elias is very delighted with himself for being the first to give voice to the idea that we might heat water on the diesel stove while at anchor. Which we are, quite successfully, and short diesel is not a problem that we are contemplating. Alisa has reacted to the propane shortage by doubling or tripling the amount of bread she makes on each baking day, reasoning that the increased production takes little or no more propane than her normal two loaves. She also has produced pigs in a blanket on her last baking day and has promised them for today – hot dogs wrapped in extra dough. So we have a hot lunch to look forward to. All sorts of food that are normally “just in case” rations – hot dogs and canned fruit most notably – have become staples. No one is grumbling about the shortage and though Alisa is occasionally at a complete loss when meal time arrives she has expressed the upside in the form of not feeling her normal remorse and responsibility if a meal falls short of expectation. Which of course they never do. We’ll all feel the luxury of living with no limits to the propane whenever that happy day comes again.

The final end to all propane on board and the end to our visas – both these events are far enough in the future to allow us the chance to explore a bit around Estero Peel, the fjord that gave Bill Tilman and crew access to the Patagonian Icecap on Mischief in 1956. We are at this moment anchored in a little cove that the monumental Italian Guide refers to as “Caleta Tilman”. The old man would have likely found this a comic appellation, as he only anchored Mischief here because he couldn’t reach Caleta Amalia, where he really wanted to be, due to all the floating ice about. See the quote from Mischief in Patagonia at the top of this post. Or, on the other hand, the old fellow might have found that if some place was going to be named for him, it might as well be as inconsequential a place as this.

The boys quite enjoyed our arrival at Caleta Tilman because low tide revealed a scrap of open land that might more or less reasonably be called a beach, and with it the attendant chance to walk a few hundred meters before turning around. Eric has in all the innocence of extreme youth asked Alisa why we came to this place (meaning Patagonia), anyway? He feels the enforced confinement more than Elias who can read Harry Potter over and over. Eric has been pining a bit for Polynesia, where at least he could swim, though his inability to swim at the ripe old age of four, and now five, has attracted quite a bit of negative attention from management on board Galactic. On the bright side he is just now learning the basics of literacy, though he takes greatest delight in reading (and writing, in a surprisingly clear hand) words like “scream”, “stinky”, “fart” and “butt”.

On the beach of this caleta where Tilman and company found bugger all we found a pair of Adidas trainers, a smart phone and a Becker beer can (empty). Alisa found a substantial stream for doing laundry and now the laundry is hanging in the rigging to “dry” at the same time that our rain catcher is hanging in the rigging, doing its job. This is either a setup for ineffectiveness or a situation where we’ll win one way or the other.

It’s all how you look at it.

The post South American Adventure appeared first on Cruising World.

The weather forecast was from a different world from the one we had been inhabiting in the northern canales. If you just looked at the forecast without squinting and imagining, it was hard to see us traveling at all for the next week.

Which would be no biggie, of course.

Except.

Except that our visas for Chile were going to expire in less than a month, and Puerto Natales, the next place where we could cross into Argentina in a single day to renew our visas, and therefore not have to leave the boat unattended overnight, was still far away.

And, there was this thing with our propane. We left Puerto Montt with a stockpile of propane that would last us three or three and a half months in the tropics. But we have somehow gone through three quarters of it in about five weeks.

We weren’t using that much more with all the mugs-ups that were seeing us through each day. Were the tanks under-filled in Puerto Montt? We don’t know. But the idea of being stuck in some caleta days from anywhere, listening to the sleet on deck, with no propane to facilitate the cooking process, was not an outcome that I wanted to entertain.

And the next place where we could hope to fill our US tanks was…that same Puerto Natales, still so far away.

Back when I was an ambitious Alaskan mountain climber of mediocre ability, my ambitious-if-mediocre climbing friends and I would occasionally meet climbers coming up from Outside with plans to climb Denali (Alaska’s 6,000 meter peak) in winter. We’d roll our eyes and shrug our shoulders. Living in Alaska was proof against being so silly as trying to climb the highest peak on the continent in winter.

I’ve long ago decided that sailing to the Land of Fire in winter is not the same thing as trying to climb Denali in winter – i.e., proof that you are both clueless and a show-off.

We have so many friends and acquaintances who have sailed here – some of them in winter – and they’re such normal people. Better sailors than us, for the most part, but still complete amateurs and everyday people, just like us.

For us, sailing south in the winter was never a goal. It’s more or less that we frittered the summer away on one thing and another, and it seemed a better idea to get going south when we were ready, rather than to sit in the marina in Puerto Montt all winter, waiting for a “better” season. And besides, if those people we knew had done it, etc., etc.

But, in the dark night as we were dashing around at the end of the anchor chain in Caleta Ideal, it was all starting to seem a bit…adventurous.

We took more than an academic interest the next day when we shoved off to sail down Canal Messier. Could we, you know, travel in the conditions that presented themselves?

That was one of the most stirring sailing days we’ve ever had. Nine knots through the water under staysail alone isn’t our normal sort of outing.

It was such a stirring day that we didn’t get any pictures at all.

The weather was supposed to go from nine-knots-under-staysail-alone to completely shitting itself mate, to quote one of my better-spoken Tasmanian friends. So we were very happy to execute a four point tie-in before dark.

And so we’ve established something of a rhythm. Some days we don’t travel, but we’re happily surprised that we are able to most days.

And though I’ve decided that people who sail to Patagonia and then talk about the weather are in the same category as those people who live in Alaska and complain about the cold winters, it is hard to escape the physical conditions if I’m trying to give some impression of the place. How dark it is when we wake up. How the rain is cold enough to feel like a different element from the water we’re used to. That sort of thing.

We’re also getting well into the routine of tying into shore every night. We know some other Patagonia newbies who express various degrees of skepticism about tying in, or who try to tie in only when they are forced to.

We figure that until we know what the hell is going on, we’re going to act like our friends who know a lot more than us and tie in every night – with four shore lines if it feels like at all a good idea. Weather surprises do happen, and I figure the night will come when we’re very glad to be defensively set up. And the practice of doing this every night can only help when we come to a situation when finding a safe berth isn’t straightforward.

A Single Piece of Petrel Down

At the anchorage where we finished the crossing we met Patrick, a singlehander on Cephalais II. He had been sitting in Caleta Ideal for a week, waiting for a chance to cross to the north, with only the short-range forecasts relayed by the San Pedro lighthouse to guide him.

Patrick was finishing a tough trip from the south. In Punta Arenas a wind shift left his boat exposed to the full fury of the Straits of Magellan while he happened to be ashore dining with a friend. Repairs took two months.

Our second night in Ideal felt insecure. The rig shuddered and the boat swung. Although we have a very good anchoring setup, we would prefer to be tied to shore in some little nook rather than swinging in the gusts.

Leaving Ideal was a difficult decision. We were conscious of our inexperience in these waters, and the golden rule of never leaving a secure anchorage in bad weather. After we picked the hook Patrick followed, acting on his decision to go wait in the village of Tortel for a while.

We fairly flew down Canal Messier, the main north-south route in this part of the canales. Nine and ten knots through the water, with the opposing tide bothering us not at all. Alisa kept me company under the dodger with its made-for-Patagonia back door/rain shield. No school, and the boys were for (literally) the first time in our sailing career abandoned to the electronic nanny of the iPad. They watched the French cartoons that I downloaded in my failed campaign to turn them into little Francophones.

That was last season. This season I’m concentrating on my failure to turn them into Spanish speakers.

I haven’t seen this many shades of gray since the Aleutians, said Alisa.

Giant petrels swooped behind us. A single piece of petrel down went scudding across the waves, passing us in the wind.

We declined the offer of the first three good caletas we came to. We’re out here, traveling fast, I reasoned. No reason to stop. We came to rest in Caleta Morgane, a little nook surrounded by absolutely primeval rainforest. A creek pours foam and tannin into the ocean just off our stern and four shore lines hold us exactly where we want to be.

Elias helped with the lines, pulling out slack for me while I rowed them ashore. He shouted not-quite-to-the-point questions and misheard my replies. The diesel stove warmed us all up and Alisa made green chicken curry.

After the boys went to sleep we recapped the day. We just need to keep making good decisions, I said. We’re learning so much every day.

When we left Alaska to sail to Australia with our toddler for crew, we thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But then we had our second child, and bought our second boat, and sailed across the Pacific a second time. We’ve been living aboard for seven years now. Sometimes we wonder how long we’ll keep at it, but all we know for sure is that the end doesn’t seem to be in sight just yet. Click here to read more from the Twice in a Lifetime blog.

The post The Switch appeared first on Cruising World.

Elias and Eric Litzow

There are at 16 longliners rafted up here in Caleta Suarez. Galactic is boat number 17, on the far side of the front row, right up against the side of the caleta. During a brief break in the weather all of the fishing boats save one went out to jig for cierra, the barracuda of southern Chile. Then they all returned, and a crop of new boats making the dash from the canales of the north followed them. Boat after boat stacked up in ranks behind us, and we are well and truly trapped until boats start leaving. Which is fine, of course, as we can’t go anywhere in the theatrical weather that’s prevailing right now. But it’s also a tiny bit disconcerting for us to ever give up our ability to move at will. Self-volition, and the ability to move where and when we want, are so much the keys to the game that we play.

So after everyone stacked in, the gale resumed in earnest during the night, and Galactic felt a bit like a tick on the side of an elephant. We were stuck to one side of this massive body of lashed-together boats, at the mercy of the elephant’s movements. Fishing boats are designed to be heavy and strong – to bash into stuff and carry heavy loads and to be driven by massive engines. Yachts are designed to be strong but light, to be fleet before the wind. Incidental contact that is no big deal for a longliner can be a very big deal for us. And moving up from a group of eight longliners in one rank, which we were rafted to for the first three days, to 16 longliners in three ranks, felt like a big step down in control over the situation. We were more tick, and the elephant was more elephant.

Luckily, we are steel, and stronger than average for a 45′ yacht. During that first night when there were 16 of us it was blowing 40 knots on the outside and gusting in the caleta. I was up on deck off an on through the night, and we were so glad to have our six massive stainless-steel mooring cleats welded into the hull.

And I’ve been so glad to have the little Spanish I have. I can row over to the far side of the stack to explain that we’re close to shore, and ask that boat to tighten up their shore lines to give us a little more security against swinging into the shallows. And when I do that, the crew of this boat that I just met will immediately offer to set another shore line. I’ll talk weather with the captain while the crew digs out a line, then I’ll row a deckhand ashore with the new line, and they’ll send me back to Galactic with a couple fish for our dinner. We have friends who have sailed here with no Spanish, and of course they’ve gotten along just fine, but I think that interactions like that one would require a lot more force of personality on the part of a non-Spanish speaking yachtie.

That interaction with the boat on the other side of the stack was typical, by the way. Throughout the five days we’ve been here every fisherman we’ve had dealings with has been solicitous and helpful. I’ve had some fun chats, as well, though my conversational ability in highly vernacular Chilean Spanish sets very strict limits on these.

If the rain lets up today I think I’ll take Eric and make the rounds of the boats.

Through the Door

In these waters the rule to never waste a fair wind applies with singular force. -Bill Tilman

“The Gulf of Sorrows” is the most compelling English rendition that I’ve seen for the Spanish name Golfo de Penas.

The secret to seeing Patagonia from the decks of your own boat is los canales – the intricate fjords that give you protection all the way from Chiloé to the southern tip of South America and the Land of Fire – about a thousand nautical miles of this spectacular coastline.

There’s only one break in the fjords that requires an overnight sail in open-water conditions – the Gulf of Sorrows, more or less a 95-mile crossing from Caleta Suarez to Caleta Ideal.

Among our friends who have preceded us to Patagonia, the Gulf of Sorrows enjoys a reputation that nearly lives up to its name. A perennially big swell, unreasonably strong winds, and a shoreward-setting current make it the full meal deal for sailing at 47°S.

For our southbound journey on Galactic, the Gulf of Sorrows is the door we needed to step through to gain access to the “true” south.

The two day trips along the outer coast that carried us to Caleta Suarez were emblematic of the weather we had experienced in Chile up to that point. Blue sky, flat water over a two-meter swell. Postcard weather. A quick look at the three-day forecast as we approached Suarez showed a day of poor weather, followed by more of the good.

Five days later, we found ourselves still in Suarez, rafted up to 18 weather-bound longliners. The Don Adrian II, the big Patagonian toothfish longliner next to us, was talking about spending another week waiting for good weather.

In the Gulf, it was blowing 40, with a swell up to seven meters. Some other crew without our stern outlook on the vicissitudes of the sailing life might have regretted our decision not to just get across the Gulf when we had such benign weather. We Galacticans, on the other hand, have long since gotten used to learning from our own mistakes. I figured that an enforced wait after throwing away such good conditions on sleeping at anchor was a good lesson on the road to becoming savvy Patagonia sailors.

The forecast showed breaks in the weather, but they tended to offer brief spells of fairly marginal conditions.

The other night, after the boys had gone to sleep, Alisa and I looked at the forecast over and over, wondering if we should make a break for it the next morning.

Uncertainty over the reputation of the Gulf and the paucity of bail-out options finally gave way to spirit of “ain’t never gonna get perfect conditions, and we won’t know if we don’t go.” When I went over to the Don Adrian II to tell the crew that we would leave in the morning, I felt confirmed in our decision to learn that 12 of the longliners with nearby fishing grounds were planning to go out to the day before returning to Suarez.

So we went.

And it was just about as gnarly as we would care for, thank you very much. We like the feeling (illusion?) of having everything under control.

Which it was – under control, that is. The swell was big, and the breeze was a bit more than we would like when the squall lines came through. But the wind was behind us, and we picked up a ridiculously strong current – up to four knots at times – that saw us complete the crossing in 14 hours.

The entrance to the southern canals was alive with seabirds – petrels (diving, storm and giant), black-browed albatross, and Cape pigeons, those Southern Ocean favorites we haven’t seen in any number since the New Zealand sub-antarctic. The mountains of Península Larenas and Isla Wager appeared out of the mist as the waves stacked up behind us. And, thanks to the current, we managed to anchor up in Caleta Ideal in the daylight, a real treat after groping out of Caleta Suarez in the pitch.

And so, we’re here. Puerto Edén is suddenly only a few days’ travel away from us. And our hope to reach Puerto Natales in a month to renew our visas is looking more reasonable.

When we left Alaska to sail to Australia with our toddler for crew, we thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But then we had our second child, and bought our second boat, and sailed across the Pacific a second time. We’ve been living aboard for seven years now. Sometimes we wonder how long we’ll keep at it, but all we know for sure is that the end doesn’t seem to be in sight just yet. Click here to read more from the Twice in a Lifetime blog.

The post Tick on an Elephant appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s a funny thing when some place is described as the best in its category. South Pacific Anchorages refers to Ra’ivavae as possibly the most beautiful anchorage in the South Pacific. Predictably, we were a little underwhelmed when we arrived, though we had a wonderful time there.

Caleta Suarez, on the outside coast just north of the Gulf of Sorrows, is described by the authoritative Italian Guide as “one of the safest and most beautiful coves in Patagonia.” So of course we were left a little flat when we arrived. Nothing can compete with unrealistic expectations.

However, we didn’t have long to worry about the difference between reality and an uninformed ideal, as we found ourselves immersed in an unexpected social experience. A northerly blow was forecast and we found ourselves rafted up with eight Chilean longliners that had also sought out protection in the caleta.

So we’re getting down with these forty new best friends of ours, as best as our Spanish will allow. (It can’t be rusty, I figure, if it’s never been shiny.) We are something of a novelty to these fishermen for whom the tedium of waiting out a blow is very much part of the routine. Gifts of fish and cake and loans of age-inappropriate Anime movies for our kids are flowing from their boats to ours, and gifts of cake and smokes bought for just such an event are making the reciprocal outbound journey from Galactic.

If we were the types to think retrospectively, we would realize that the two days of calm that we saw on the outside coast prior to getting here constituted a rare chance to get across the Gulf of Sorrows and to regain the shelter of los canales on the other side. The weather forecast promises poor conditions ever further into the future.

But of course, it’s all a part of the adventure, this sort of unexpected encounter. And, as a friend of ours says, a sailor with time always has a fair wind.

When we left Alaska to sail to Australia with our toddler for crew, we thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But then we had our second child, and bought our second boat, and sailed across the Pacific a second time. We’ve been living aboard for seven years now. Sometimes we wonder how long we’ll keep at it, but all we know for sure is that the end doesn’t seem to be in sight just yet. Click here to read more from the Twice in a Lifetime blog.

The post The Five (or Six or Seven or Eight) Day Blow appeared first on Cruising World.

The standing joke at the Alwoplast boatyard in Valdivia, Chile—the builders of my Atlantic series of cruising catamarans—goes like this: “Break out the umbrellas! Chris is coming to sea-trial a new boat.” So when my wife, Kate, and I recently landed in the town of Temuco to sunny skies, I was stunned. An hour later, however, as we turned off the Pan American Highway on the drive to the Pacific coast, the cloud deck worked lower and the raindrops increased with every mile. Ah, I thought, that’s better.

The plan was to board PataGao, a brand-new Atlantic 57 catamaran, with owner Jim Whalen and Alwoplast’s Alex Wopper and Roni Klingenberg, for a weeklong shakedown cruise in the spectacular cruising ground of coastal Chilean Patagonia. We eagerly anticipated sailing in a new region and sampling generous amounts of local seafood and wine.

For a month, Alex had been sending emails about the bleak El Niño weather and its near-continuous torrential rains with unseasonably strong winds. Though everyone had been looking forward to the cruise, I could sense the enthusiasm level receding with each report. February is normally Chile’s driest month, in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere summer, the prime time to enjoy a taste of Patagonia sailing. But it was looking like a washout.

Even so, at the boatyard, things were very much on schedule. Sails were bent on, electronics fully functioning, and engines and other systems checked out and operational. We agreed that early the next morning, we’d take a brief trial sail in the Valdivia River. If no problems developed and the weather looked OK, we’d make a break south the following day.

Our short sail in the river went well—it was sunny, and almost warm—and the weather forecast looked great for yet another day before strong northerly winds would close the harbor. In Chile, there are very few private yachts, and the Chilean national navy regulates their movements. You must obtain permission to move from port to port, and when the navy has doubts about the weather, it closes the harbors in the interests of safety and won’t allow anyone to leave. This seems a bit heavy-handed to me, but those are the rules. The coastline is very rugged, with long distances between safe harbors, and frequent gales. In any case, if we jumped on it, our cruise could begin immediately.

Valdivia is one of the best harbors in southern Chile, and in the days of yore, it was the first town where square-riggers coming north from Cape Horn could refit and provision. Today, Alwoplast Marine serves many yachts of all sizes in their preparations for southbound journeys. The prime cruising ground starts about 120 nautical miles south, where the monolithic coastline gives way to thousands of miles of islands, channels, and glacial fjords that allow inside passage most of the way to the Horn. Both Alex and Roni have sailed extensively in this region and would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. It was a treat to have such good local knowledge on board.

With a crisp land breeze and the scent of pine trees in the air, we set forth, but once we were clear of the river, the breeze vanished. Oh, well, part of our mission was to uncover what didn’t work before Jim and his crew departed for the Galápagos Islands and Panama in a few weeks. So on came the engines, and we powered south along the rugged coast.

Like her sisters, PataGao motors very well; she’ll do eight knots on one engine and 10.5 knots running both. Our goal was to get into the Canal de Chacao, about 100 miles south, before the forecast northwesterly filled in. This channel is about 10 miles long and a mile and a half wide, and it separates the large island of Isla Grande de Chiloe from the mainland. The rub here is that the tidal current can run at 10 knots! When it’s blowing hard, it creates overfalls that have rolled large ships. Roni had seen it in an ugly mood and didn’t savor a repeat experience, so there was some urgency to knock out that first leg quickly.

During the course of the day, the wind built to 20 to 25 knots, but it was right on the nose. The wind-induced chop on top of the eight-foot swell made conditions a bit rough, but PataGao—Portuguese for “big foot,” the original name that Magellan supposedly bestowed on the natives of Patagonia—was maintaining a very comfortable eight knots at cruising rpm, so we kept motoring in an effort to reach the canal before the westerly shift. Other than a few whales and a tugboat steaming north, we saw nothing afloat, just the mountainous wall of coastline mostly covered with evergreens, with an occasional glimpse of a snow-capped volcano in the distance.

It was well past sunset when we entered the Canal de Chacao. The wind had eased, and the fearsome conditions were only hinted at in great swirls of water and current rips—clear enough warnings to experienced sailors to watch and be wary. Roni piloted us into the anchorage on the northern shoreline at Carelmapu, where we could anchor for the night among the commercial fishing boats and wait for the morning’s favorable flood tide.

The next morning, we continued eastward through the channel. The northern tip of Chiloe was to starboard as we passed two navy vessels trolling for wreckage from a recent ferry sinking. The favorable current was running at about six knots. Great big eddies were marked by diving birds and numerous seals and penguins fishing up a storm.

Entering into Bahía de Chacao, we turned right down the eastern side of Chiloe, which is about 100 miles long and sits some 30 miles off the mainland. Sailing along its beautiful, serene shore, we saw scenery reminiscent of Maine or Nova Scotia: numerous islands and coves, and rolling hills and pasture with an occasional farmhouse. But when we looked east across to the mainland, the sight of the snow-capped Andes with smoking volcanoes interspersed between the craggy, 15,000-foot peaks was evidence that, figuratively speaking, we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Alex and Roni—both incredibly intelligent, multilingual, and, most important, fun to hang out with—are quite a pair. The founder of Alwoplast, Alex built a cruising boat in Germany as a young man and took off around the world. He fell in love with the wild regions of southern Chile and settled in Valdivia some 25 years ago to make a living building boats, gradually working up in size from Tornado racing catamarans to a variety of commercial and pleasure cats, both sail and power.
Now that the boatyard has grown to employ 50 people, Alex runs the business end of things and his right-hand man, Roni, manages the shop floor. Born and raised in Chile of German descent, he’s an engineer by disposition as well as formal education and a born problem solver. One seldom sees him without his head buried in an instruction manual or performing mechanical surgery on a piece of faulty equipment. It was a great crew to have on board a new boat for a shakedown cruise, especially because, as we all know, new boats can have some gremlins.

Our first anchorage in northern Patagonia was at quiet Isla Mechuque, part of a cute group of little islets offering many protected bays. The weather was overcast and raw, so we all were content to sit inside the heated pilothouse and watch the 12-foot tide slowly recede in our little cove. The next morning, a fellow in a small rowboat came alongside and asked if we’d like some shellfish. Why, of course! Thirty minutes later, he came back with a huge bucket filled with a variety of mussels of different sizes and three types of clams. He was all smiles when we happily agreed to his modest asking price, the equivalent of just a few U.S. dollars.

The day was clear and provided a fine sailing breeze, so we weighed anchor and continued southwest toward the small but vibrant fishing and farming town of Dalcahue, on Chiloe, about 20 miles away. Alex was keen to show us the Saturday market, and though we were well provisioned, it was hard to resist buying lots more of the incredible local fare: smoked salmon and mussels, sun-dried clams, edible seaweed, local cheese, delicious corn, unusual varieties of potato, and all manner of vegetables. Cruising in this region of Patagonia is definitely not part of a weight-loss program.

The following day, we worked farther south along the eastern side of Chiloe, zigzagging through a long maze of narrow channels with beautiful and varied views of forests, farmland, and many fish farms. While the boating is spectacular in this region, the sailing is often marginal. The long, narrow channels, banked by high ground, makes what wind there is choppy and typically either dead ahead or dead astern. Throw in two- to three-knot tidal currents and you have waters where motorsailing is the sensible way to travel much of the time. Since cats motorsail so well, with decent speed and very good fuel economy, they’re well suited to the area.

Our goal for the day was Chiloe’s main town and the region’s capital, Castro. Because of the significant tidal range, the waterfront buildings there are constructed on very tall stilts, giving it a unique appearance. After we anchored off the town late in the afternoon, the crew was eager for a walk and a chance to check out the activity. The first stop was to run the gauntlet of seafood stalls along the waterfront, sampling the local oysters and other treats, but the most pleasant surprise turned out to be the famous church in the town square. Built of wood with numerous vaulted ceilings, it was definitely a boatbuilder’s cathedral.

We would’ve enjoyed hanging out in Castro, but we had a schedule to meet, so we kept moving. It took 30 miles of motorsailing to reach open water in the Golfo de Ancud. Once we were beyond the shadow of the hills, the breeze filled in. The day was crystal clear, and finally PataGao had a chance to stretch her legs on a deep reach. We made 10- to 14-knots before a 20- to 25-knot breeze, and 50 miles flew by.

Our destination that day was Fiordo Quintupeu. Since Alex or Roni had said little about it, the three gringos on board had little idea of what to expect. As we closed on the Andes over the course of the afternoon, the anticipation built. Eventually, a small slot opened in the near-vertical green wall ahead of us. From a distance, it was hard to get a sense of the scale, but inside the little opening was a fjord, which revealed itself as we sailed through the gap in the clear afternoon light.

It was my second religious experience in as many days.

With the exception of Somes Sound in Maine, I’m a fjord virgin, but this place was very special. If you could sail a boat into Yosemite Valley, the experience would be similar. The waterfalls were huge, wild, and stunning. No one on board could utter a word. And this was just the northern tip of a wilderness that stretches southward for another thousand miles to legendary Cape Horn.

Eventually, we came to our senses, dropped the hook in 75 feet of water—anchoring in 500 feet in the fjord’s center wasn’t an option—and ran three lines ashore in the dinghy. That evening’s sunset and morning’s stunning light were beyond my ability to capture with words.

Finally, the long stretch of clear weather was coming to an end. High clouds approaching from the west obscured the sun, and the forecast was for rain and strong winds. Our time was running short, so we made the long daysail north to the busy commercial port of Puerto Montt, where we’d dock PataGao until it was time for her to return to Valdivia.

Looking back on the trip from a cruiser’s perspective, my own preference is for warmer places. And Patagonia is far away; sailing your own boat there from any port in North America would be a rigorous, time-consuming affair. The first part of the trip was fun and interesting, but with slight modifications to names, places, and foods, I’ve cruised similar areas before.

But the fjord opened my eyes to the strong attraction Patagonia holds for many sailors. Looking southward on the chart and imagining the empty, pristine, and beautiful cruising grounds, it’s impossible not to want to keep heading in that direction. Certainly the farther south you sail, the wilder the conditions. The williwaws can be unsettling, if not dangerous. Anchoring in many places is insecure and a challenge. But if it becomes too much at any point, you can spin northward to more temperate conditions. It all seemed doable.

Will I ever take the time to sail my own boat back for a cruise? Probably not. Few people do. However, having a new boat built 100 miles from Patagonia practically demands that you stay there for at least one season to savor one of the world’s most spectacular cruising grounds.

I can’t wait to do it again sometime.

Dedicated to the creation of safe, comfortable, high-performance cruising multihulls, yacht designer Chris White has continuously refined his work over four decades. When not sailing Javelin, their Atlantic 55 cat, Chris and his wife, Kate, the parents of two grown sons, reside in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

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