We have spent the last few weeks cruising the Argentinean coast of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego on the north shore of the Beagle Channel. By some quirk of history, this large island - close to the size of Ireland - got split between Argentina and Chile. As a result, the southernmost border between the two countries runs right down the middle of the Beagle Channel for the first 100 miles or so, and the Argentinean coast has a number of interesting anchorages we had never visited.

We left Ushuaia on a beautiful morning, absolutely dead calm, clear and cold, with temperatures in the low 20s. We rolled out of bed when our alarms went off at 8:00 and it was still quite dark. We had had wanted to get an early start because we were heading west, against the prevailing winds in this part of the world, and the forecast called for calm conditions until mid-morning, when a 20-25 knot westerly wind was supposed to begin blowing. By the time we had eaten breakfast and were pulling up the anchor, the rising sun had painted the sky to the north in rich, rosy red hues and frosted the snow-covered mountaintops on the south shore of the Beagle with pink. The heavy frost had turned our non-skid decks into sure-skid, so we moved carefully, our breath climbing the cold air in long white plumes. The deck wash hose was frozen somewhere between the seacock and the deck fitting, but little mud came up with the anchor. We have learned to have a kettle of water on the boil in the galley in case we have to open a frozen deck locker or get a frozen line off a cleat, but that morning we didn't have to use it. We passed between the point that protects the harbor to the south and the islands that bisect the Beagle to the west of that point and turned east. By the time we were out in the Beagle, able to see all the way to the glaciers on the 7,000 to 8,000-foot high peaks some sixty miles distant, the snow on the mountaintops glowed orange, gold and red from the rising sun.

We had dressed for the cold - I was wearing two layers of thermal underwear and a windproof fleece jacket - and we had both been a bit too warm while we were working on deck, pulling up the anchor and bringing the dinghy on board. But once underway and no longer active, the cold quickly penetrated. We had our "bus heater" - a marinized heater plumbed into the engine cooling system - running full bore. It is located just below the companionway, and its heat rises into the hard dodger. That made the top of the companionway a very attractive place to be on such a chilly morning.

In the winter, the scenery in the Beagle is reduced to a narrow palette of grays. Gone are the green leaves of the deciduous Antarctic beech trees that climb the mountains to a uniform height of 800 meters and the tough, honey-colored grasses that cover the boggy areas at their feet during the rest of the year. Instead the bare, gray branches of the twisted beech trees offer the only contrast to the white snow that blankets the mountains - except in the protracted period when the sun is finding its way over the high peaks or sinking down behind them. Then the clouds in the sky turn to delicate pink feathers or billowing explosions of gold and red, and a range of colors wash across the mountains - pink, purple, orange, gold. We were treated to a dazzling show as the sun climbed higher in the sky and we motored along through the dead calm water.

As forecast, the wind started to build as we were approaching our anchorage a few hours later, blowing down out of the glaciers and snow-covered mountain peaks. The freezer-cold gusts brought tears to our eyes when we ventured out from under the shelter of the hard dodger. As we approached our anchorage - a sheltered cove protected at its mouth by two small islets in an Argentinean national park called Lapataia (Lap-a-tie-a) - we were pleased to see that it was dead calm inside, the water reflecting the majestic mountains all around. It was only as we entered the harbor that we realized that the water we were seeing wasn't calm - it was frozen in a layer so clear and perfect it could have been glass. Hawk's bow broke through the half-inch of ice with a crunch, and then a rumbling, grumbling sound as her sides carved a channel of open water. We motored in about a hundred yards and dropped the anchor through the ice. When we went down below to light the heater and eat a big breakfast, I kept mistaking the sound of Hawk breaking the ice as she swung to her anchor for the roaring of a gale.

Overnight the wind shifted and built, causing the ice to clatter around Hawk's side as it got broken up and chased from the bay. The next day we woke to an inch or so of snow, and the snow continued to accumulate for most of the day. At times the snow swirled gently from the sky like autumn leaves, each flake visible as a separate entity, and at other times the wind picked it up and drove it horizontally in an impenetrable curtain of white. The thick clouds and swirling snow rendered our world in shades of gray, one of those hauntingly beautiful winter days that only occur when the snow comes down in big, flat flakes and all sounds are muffled by the thick powder.

We have reached the doldrums of the winter, and have once or twice felt that February-time certainty that spring will never come. Yet each day gets noticeably longer, and once in a while a warm breeze blows through, causing us to sniff expectantly for the smell of soil and new leaves. It is almost time to waken from our winter hibernation and to leave the Beagle to rendezvous with the penguins and the elephant seals returning with the spring to breed in the Falklands and South Georgia.

From the far south, where winter still reigns,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk