Hola! Hawk lies among the dozen yachts rafted three deep off the venerable ex-Micalvi, the sunken munitions carrier that serves as the Club de Yates in this settlement of 2,000 people on the south shore of the Beagle Channel. We arrived yesterday, 58 days and 1,333 nautical miles since our departure from Puerto Montt, after our third transit of the Chilean channels. We stopped at 26 anchorages on this trip, repeating only six from our two previous cruises (at 58 anchorages). Four of those were spectacular places we did not want to miss spending time in for a second or even a third time. There are so many anchorages we have still not visited along this convoluted coastline that we could probably transit the area another three times before we'd have to regularly repeat anchorages.

We have been in an anchorage with an entrance channel only twice the width of the boat and a football field in length, one totally surrounded by the high peaks of the Andes, one a freshwater lake several acres in size with water so pure we filled our tanks, one within sight of a glacier face... Pick any one of these and a dozen more and put them down in any other cruising ground in the world, and they would be the most spectacular anchorage in the area. But for us the most awesome, awe-inspiring place, one we have visited on all three of our passages through the channels, lies up a three-mile long gray-walled canyon of a fjord that appears to end in a rocky cul-de-sac and offer nothing in the way of protection.

Located almost exactly halfway between the western end of the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn, Seno Occasion extends into the westernmost tip of the 150-mile long peninsula on the southern end of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. That there is a protected cove amidst these glacier-ground rock walls is a miracle of sorts. Caleta Brecknock lies between two rocky points that jut out off the western side of the fjord, creating a tiny notch the width of three marina slips and about half again the length of our boat. There Hawk lies within half a boat length of shore on three sides, with two lines off her bow and two off her stern, tied to the twisted beech trees that have managed to grow to twenty feet or so in height.

The only way to truly appreciate the majesty of this landscape is from above. Glacier-scraped, rain-scoured and wind-swept, the land's rocky gray bones lie exposed, rising in jutting shoulders and humpbacked spines to scrape against the low-hanging clouds. Water courses down gullies and ravines, tracing white plumes across the wrinkled elephant-hide of the landscape. An overhanging lake, trapped in a basin of impermeable rock like a puddle on top of a boulder, spills a waterfall a hundred feet into the rock-walled basin at the fjord's head. The vegetation huddling in the few hollows protected from the relentless wind produces only a yellow-green softening of that gunmetal gray world of rock, water and sky.

For us, Caleta Brecknock is the frontier. To the east lies the Beagle Channel with its gunboats and charter boats, Armada stations and radio chatter, planes and settlements. To the north lies Chilean Patagonia, a thousand miles of coastline with only one settlement, thousands of anchorages and dozens of glaciers. We have always found a few pieces of garbage along the shores around the anchorages to the east, toward the Beagle. But when we arrived in Caleta Brecknock in the first week of February, we had not seen a single piece of garbage since the end of December, when we were still north of the Golfo de Penas in the "civilized" waters near Chiloe.

This land has never known the hand of man, never been molded to his purposes, shaped to feed him or cloth him or shelter him. It is wild and raw and untamable in a way no other place we have ever spent time in is. It reminds us that so many landscapes we regard as natural - the great plains of the western United States, the Pacific islands, the Outer Hebrides in Scotland - have all been shaped by man's needs and desires for thousands of years. We can have no way of knowing what those places would look like had homo sapiens never made an appearance. But here, the land is truly untouched, shaped only by the formidable forces of nature.

An entry from Beth's journal from when we visited Brecknock in November of 2002 attempts to describe something of what Brecknock means to us, what wild places do for us:

"Nowhere is the work of the elements on the land, the constant battle between land and sea, more in evidence than here. Nowhere else have I ever felt the devastating power of a raindrop to flatten vegetation and tear away soil or the mind-numbing effect of eons of gale force winds stripping bare the ragged edge of a continent to its very bones. I still hum with the feeling of joy I had there, climbing from ridge to ridge in this gray and alien landscape, sloshing in the puddles, wandering over the layers of rock jostled together in upthrusts or tumbled in mini-avalanches. I can still see the huge boulders dropped on the edge of cliffs and the great scored lines etched in the rock face by some retreating glacier thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

I don't know why I love this place so much or why I need so much these signs of nature's blind and indifferent march toward her own, unknown and unknowable, conclusion. I suppose these eternal forces give me hope that our upstart species can not really change the balance, or that if we do we will be the ones to suffer and other species will still carry on. For it's not just life that I feel here, but the very animateness of the rocks, the breathing of the water, the sense that even without its flora and fauna this planet would still somehow be. In this place more than any other, I feel the power of the living planet, life not in biological terms but in geophysical ones, life as a never-ending process of birth and growth and maturity and death and rebirth. In this sense, the stars are alive and their respective planets, whether or not they have ever hosted a bacteria or a protozoa..."

Just two days after we left Brecknock, we had one of those culture shock experiences that confirmed for us that we were no longer in the wilds of Patagonia. That day, we came down by the glaciers that line the north shore of the Beagle including the most spectacular, Italia. It just happened that when we were passing Italia, a cruise ship was going by in the opposite direction. The rails on all the decks were six deep with people, and more people were standing on stairs and what looked to be benches. It was a big ship and probably held more than 1,000 people, and all of them were taking pictures and video of us in front of the glacier. I could see flash bulbs going off all over the place. It was really weird to know that we were now going to be part of all those strangers' vacations. I bet dozens of pictures of Hawk in front of the Italia glacier got posted on the Internet that day.

Now we are back to "civilization" - such as it is. We will be spending the next six or eight months in the Beagle Channel, experiencing winter in the very far south. We feel privileged to be able to see this area not just for a few days aboard a cruise ship or a few weeks in a yacht on the way to somewhere else, but through a whole cycle of seasons. And, of course, we'll share our experiences with you along the way.

Ciao!

Beth and Evans

s/v Hawk