Arrived in Chile
17 November 2007 | Canal Chacao, Chile
Hola! We made landfall at Canal Chacao, the channel between the mainland and the large island of Chiloe at the northern end of the Chilean channels, around midnight on Monday, October 15. The following day, we rode the current through Canal Chacao, averaging 10 knots for close to 20 miles. The current decreased but stayed with us for the entire 60 miles to Puerto Montt. Somewhere on that run, we crossed our outbound track and closed the loop on our second circumnavigation. Since we were here five years ago, we have sailed more than 40,000 nautical miles (and 65,000miles on this boat), a third of that in the Southern Ocean as we passed under all five great Southern Capes.
We took a bit of a zigzag course on our passage from the Gambier Islands, sailing almost 3,800 miles in 24 days to make good the 3,200 nautical miles along the direct great circle route. Most of the zigs and zags were designed to dodge headwinds and storm winds, and it felt as if we were a ball bouncing around inside of a pinball machine trying to avoid the largest flappers that would knock us off in the wrong direction. We were still close-hauled or tacking upwind for a week out of the passage, sometimes into winds of 25 knots or more. As we reached the roaring forties, we had two downwind gales in the last four days of the passage with winds up to 45 knots. Our basic route had three legs: (1) due south to 30 degrees, in what should have been SE trade winds but we found a favorable weather pattern with NE winds. (2) Running east at 30 degrees until 105W with nice 20kt westerlies under the stationary South Pacific high. We gradually drifted 2 degrees north in order to stay in this favorable airflow. (3) Turn direct for Puerto Montt, but twice dodging a bit to the south west to go around the back of low pressure systems. The GRIBS were more accurate on this passage than normal, and routes with a lot of N/S in them give you greater leverage on the weather systems (than E/W routes), so we did much more useful weather routing on this passage
than is typical.
The image that will stay with me from this passage is being out on deck when it had been blowing at gale force for more than 12 hours. The waves were almost on our beam, large and gray, streaked with white spindrift and dozens of moving fingers of water pushed up on the surface of each wave by the wind. We were surrounded by dozens of seabirds, some close to the boat and low to the water and others far from the boat and gliding high above the wave tops. Little diving petrels a bit larger than my hand fluttered like bumble bees, sometimes flying right into the front of a wave and emerging again at the back after some 30 or 40 feet underwater. Painted petrels, also known as Cape pigeons, soared on short, stiff wings. No two are alike, for they look as if a white paint can splattered over a black bird, leaving them blotched with white splashes like a piebald horse. And albatrosses! We had gray-headed, black-browed and wandering albatrosses all around us. Their wings flex when they glide to form a perfect parabola that ends at the wingtips which lift like fingers from the arc of the wing. They glide down the face of a wave, compressing the air under their winds as they approach the water, then use the lift that gives them to soar back upward over the back of the next wave before gliding down again. I could pick one out and watch for as long as I could keep it in sight, sometimes for as much as half an hour, and never see the bird flap even once or move so much as a feather to stay aloft. These swirling, soaring, gliding creatures added color and life to the windswept tableau of heaving gunmetal gray and frothing white, a world without a horizontal surface or a single stationary point.
As we got further south, the days lengthened and the temperature dropped. We left Gambier wearing shorts and tee-shirts and sleeping under a light cotton blanket. By the time we reached Canal Chacao, we were sleeping under three blankets and a down sleeping bag and, when we were on watch, wearing three layers of thermal underwear, hats, gloves, sea boots and foul weather gear. The last three days we had gray, overcast skies and an almost constant, frigid rain - welcome to Chile!
If I was wondering why we wanted to come back here, though, the short trip from Canal Chacao to Puerto Montt certainly reminded me. It all seemed so familiar and felt so inviting. The fishermen going by in their wooden, bright yellow boats waved at us merrily; the white-headed Peruvian pelicans winged by in large flotillas; rolling, tree-covered hills backed the brightly painted houses on stilts in the small fishing villages along the channel, the dozens of little islands dotted the large sound we were sailing through Spring has just arrived, and many trees were in flower, splashing patches of yellow and white across the wooded hills. It was beautiful despite the overcast and frequent rain showers. And it was more prosperous than we remembered, with large salmon and mussel farms along the channels and fishing communities with well-kept boats hauled up on the foreshore and new-looking houses painted in every color of the rainbow behind.
When we tied up at Marina del Sur, lots of other memories came to me from our winter here - the tinny honking of the buff-necked ibises as they fly in by in groups of three or four overhead, the raucous roar of the crowd in the football stadium at Chiniquie just above the marina, smiling faces we haven't seen in five years. It almost felt like coming home.
Now we're tied up and secure in a berth for the first time since March in Mexico. We just returned from a foray into town where we could hardly take in the shelves lined with consumer goods and the supermarkets full of fresh fruits and vegetables after more than six months in places without either. We've been gorging on salad, trying to get our fill of green after not having anything fresh on board beyond a few elderly potatoes and onions for the last three months. We'll be here in Puerto Montt for the next month, working on the various boat projects that inevitably arise after almost 8,000 offshore miles and provisioning and canning for the trip down the channels. We hope to reach Puerto Williams by early January, but much will depend on how our time goes here and how the weather is this season in the channels.
After now having sailed to Chile from both the east and the west, we can definitively say its much easier from the east. You can roar down the Argentine coast, reaching in big winds right off the beach with no waves. From the west, both the coastal and offshore routes have big waves and difficult & complex weather patterns. Of course, arriving from the east means you have to go up the canals in constant northerly headwinds, but at least that is in flat inshore water with good anchorages in which to wait for favorable weather.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk