Leaving Puerto Williams

Amid a plume of smoke the old Yanmar stuttered into life leaving a cloud of grey and blue scudding across the decks of the other boats moored at the Micalvi in Puerto Williams.

It was my third attempt at setting sail from Puerto Williams, this time weighed heavy with provisions and Loris, my new crew member. Together we puttered out into the Beagle with the promise of light winds and long days, leaving Navarino and Ushuaia and by midnight making our way past Punta Divide and on into the Brazo Noreste. The night lasted about four hours and the dawn bought magnificent glaciers and mountain peaks bearing silent witness to our passage. The newly fixed motor never missed a beat and we fell easily into three hour watches.

A peaceful second night at anchor saw us setting the sails as the wind returned and we made our way through the channels accompanied by dolphins, seals and gulls.

By the end of the second day we made Caleta Brecknock on the western extreme and I saw with great excitement the beginnings of the South Pacific with its gentle undulating swell coming from the west. The anchorage was superb, smooth swirls of grey rocks, sweeping and dipping, vestiges of the glaciers that melted long ago. Water falls cascading from the cliffs and a bowl of peaks in which lay a small cove, sheltered from all winds and a quiet anchorage.

From Brecknock to Canal Cockburn the weather picked up, 25knots of westerlies with rain storms and gusts kept us both busy helming and reefing. In a moment it would change from sunshine to a grey descendence of cloud and drizzle, a chain of unpredictable winds and squalls being thrown at us as we peaked from beneath our rainsodden oil skins, feeling the cold biting at our soaked hands within our gloves.

Paso O'Ryan, where the volume of the Magellan Strait forces its way into the Pacific through one of three channels to the south. We approached the most constricted point where the depth was just 4 metres with a slack tide run of 5 knots against, in a swirling vortex of ripping waters, with 20 knots of wind on the tail, the mainsail let fully out and the engine at full throttle making less than a knot speed over ground, a slightly stressful experience, the partially submerged rock on the starboard looking ominous as we crawled by at a snails pace, and then eventually into calmer waters and later to anchor in a quiet bay just south of the Magellan.

We wait a day, calm winds prevail and we rest up now, humidity in the boat has reached 96% so the stove is lit and we enjoy the warmth. Loris takes a bath in a nearby river whereas I will suffer my unclean for a few days more at least!

I make chapatis, a small bird of prey screeches overhead and the waters lap against the smooth stones on the nearby shore. We are anchored and tied with a line to the trees, the rain comes and goes, brightening and darkening, and we can see the snow on the mountains.

Tomorrow we begin the next leg to travel the Magellan to Canal Smythe. It's exposed to the ocean and the westerlies. Joshua Slocum waited here for a month to be able to cross, hopefully we won't wait that long.

Canal Pedro - Magellan Strait - Into Canal Smyth.

The Magellan Strait, the zig zag stretch of water that links the Atlantic to the Pacific whilst cutting a natural swath between Patagonia and Tierra Del Fuego, separating completely the two masses of land on the southern tip of South America. Notorious for distressing and constant systems of weather with tidal streams, rain and hail storms and williwaws, it was not without a slight trepidation that we emerged from Canal Pedro and turned northwest into the passage to make our way to Tamar Island, 45 miles distant, the turning point to the north and the shelter of Canal Smyth.

Winds ranging from south west to west made the going tough, beating and tacking into a stiff chop making appallingly slow progress, zig zagging back and forth across the channel and making a somewhat disheartening one mile per hour progress. The same small island or light house would taunt us through the hours spent beating into the wind and crawling past, a few hundred metres progress on each tack, but we told our selves, we are making progress!

A coastguard helicopter flew by and we talked in the vhf, it was good to know the resources set in place giving a little peace of mind in an environment that could at times feel torrid and wild, never letting us forget the remoteness of this part of the world.

Squalls of freezing rain and hail would bring strong winds which would propel us forwards but then we would loop back in the lulls.

When the wind became to much we would surrender and make refuge in a bay, the first night found me tacking into completely the wrong bay wondering why we had a depth reading of 50 metres when the chart said 5! By the time we found the right cove, the evening light had dwindled to pitch black, not an experience I would like to repeat, motoring blind into an area where the charting is dubious and there is no way to perceive the boundaries and shorelines by eye.

The end of the second day found us much like the first, taking refuge in a bay notorious for screaming williwaws from the northerly cliffs, quiet upon our arrival, just the gushing of a waterfall down the undulating mass of grey rock.

We stayed from 9pm then left at 1am with the promise of favorable winds, for the first time we were making progress in the right direction at 5 knots, some ships lights coming and going and the blinking of a lighthouse on the distant northwest islands.

Night gave way to the dawn and the wind steadily rose, plugging a tide and beating in to the growing swell coming from the Pacific. The sea becoming bigger and more confused, the only way forward to motorsail. 15 Hp against swell, chop and wind, tacking to the southwest, wind filling the sails, the bow occasionally disappearing into a morass of grey and white, the water running back to the drain on the gunnels, lurching and crashing into the spree.

Keeping Tamar island to starboard we finally tacked around and sailing conditions instantly changed, swapping head banging crashing for lurching side swipes on the beam that made us roll and surge to leeward whilst keeping a straight trajectory for the entrance to Canal Smyth, 15 miles distant.

Our arrival into the shelter of Smyth felt like the entry into a new world, where the water was flat, and the surrounding landscape was lower and more forgiving. We felt jubilant and comforted by this more sedate passage, the first night spent in a quiet bay where we foraged for rarely found dry wood and managed to air the boat to a far more acceptable level of humidity whilst drying out clothes and bedding in the sun that had appeared the next morning.

We set sail again later that day and whistled up the canal to Paso Victoria, some 35 miles to the north. We wait here now, securely anchored and tied to the shore waiting for another system to pass.

We are making good progress having sailed over 500 miles since we left Puerto Williams, we are 150 miles from Puerto Eden, the next inhabited hamlet that has no roads and no cars and is only approachable by boat, it could take days or it could take weeks, such is our reliance on the ever changing weather that serves us or constricts us.

Puerto Eden

Puerto Eden The weather forecast predicted a flat calm, but the clouds were scudding through the sky from the south south west. We left our cosy little bay in the early evening and headed out into the channel where we managed to pick up a good breeze to head north. Through the night we sailed with the wind building on our tail giving us a good 6 knots of speed with additional favourable current. The next day found calmer conditions where we sailed gently with the wind abaft under blue skies and hot sunshine, slipping through narrow channels between high lumpy mountains of green trees and black rock strewn with ribbons of white, waterfalls cascading with dolphins and seagulls for company. The final stretch to Puerto Eden, leaving a wake through a surface of glass as the evening wore on, finally arriving after three weeks of isolation to go alongside the jetty by the local police station. It's always a little surreal coming into a populated place after several weeks away, there is a gentle comfort and familiarity mixed with the dubious luxury of once again having a phone signal and plugging back in to the world beyond the gunnels and mountains that lie all around. Being out in the channels brings a peace and a solitude which I like and has been great to share with my crew. Puerto Eden, a small collection of houses and shacks linked by wooden walkways where in some places grow fuscias and raspberries. Most houses have a wood pile with an axe and piles of logs, a chainsaw under a scrap of plastic and dogs laze in a rare moment of sunshine. There are no roads or cars here, all is accessed by boat. Mainly small fishing boats, brightly coloured, made of wood, some open, some with a cabin, all with a modern outboard engine bolted astern. There is little sense here of much European descendancy that can be found in proliferation in neighbouring Argentina. The folk here are short and squat with heavy dark features and husky rapid ways of talking that leaves me struggling to understand most interactions. I went to the shop, the window displaying the important things in life, for the women, a plethora of cleaning products, the other window devoted to whisky and Pisco. Inside the gloomy interior, the shelves stacked with tinned fish and Coca Cola, I ask about buying 160 litres of diesel. It's pretty expensive and we arrange to make the transfer on the quay. In an hour I go looking for the guy, he needs help hauling the 60litre barrels of fuel from his chicken coop to a small trolley up the earthy path to the walkway. The containers are filthy and the pipe he brings for siphoning is covered in black deposits. We haul the whole lot down to the quay whereby I insist on using my own pipe and funnel with filter. I wipe the mouths of the barrels clean of debris as we decant enough that we can pour, which is quicker. We laugh and joke about being patient and the taste of diesel whilst the old guy looks on, keeping his eye on the levels of the containers we are filling. We are all done and I hand over 177,000 pesos, shake hands and part ways. I like being in a place where there's no wifi and the electricity goes off every afternoon. Where a weekly ferry brings provisions and most people are adept at fixing stuff and swinging a hammer. Where the locals are friendly and the dogs passive. Soon I go to Puerto Natales on the ferry, a 24 hour passage to kick off my mammoth trip back to the uk. This morning I was offered a passage on a commercial vessel with a rough and ready crew, free of charge, as long as I could cook. It was a tempting offer for what I think could have been a unique experience but I have to stay in comms for my crew who is sailing AISLING up to Puerto Montt. I'm probably too old to muck down in a greasy dirty steel hulk, certainly I would have jumped at the opportunity 20 years ago. Now I prefer a little more comfort, a real bed for the first time since September, and some good food and a hot shower.