Last Monday (9th of March) Puerto Williams had a dramatic day, by the standards of this little isolated city: a number of orcas chased two whales onto the shores, and went on to kill them eventually. Orcas are seen in the area rather occasionally, and while whales are common in the channels of Chile, they don’t often enter the bay. They tend also not to be sei whales as these ones were, being the smaller humpbacks normally.
With the start of 2020, our arrival in the Cape Horn province, which was I think 6th of January, is now a year behind us already. We weren’t planning on spending so long here, but as we bought a rather dilapidated boat in a rather distant place, a lot of delay was always likely. Gean has some work restoring another yacht locally, so raising some rather necessary money. But of course repairs to our own boat have decreased in the meantime. Still the area’s a scenic one, if sometimes limited and chilly. Not bad till we can be off on our journey.
Tied to the Ponton Micalvi, the stranded naval vessel that acts as dock in Puerto Williams, are boats of two varieties, all moored onto one another in rows with the last to arrive outside. There are the charterers, with their trips in the summer to Cape Horn or to Antarctica, and there are the cruisers, stopping for a few months at the tip of South America before they turn north from here. But one yacht’s never left Micalvi in the years we’ve known the place, innermost boat in the innermost row throughout that time, next to Micalvi with six visitors outside. An enormous wooden schooner with the paint lost from her planks long before, adding to her folkloric appearance. To port, the name on the bow was now incomplete. The starboard bow read ‘Victory’.
Continue reading “Bible boat: Chilean-built tall ship Victory”
It doesn’t seem so long since we last left for Argentina, at the start of winter, our first trip in our semi-repaired Space Oddity. Three months later, when the frosts were thinning and the snows were falling less frequently, the same visa-related reasons compelled us to repeat the journey. Which was a problem for our ever-expanding German Shepherd crossbreed Zibby, whom we’d adopted after the first trip as a six-week-old puppy. Without his vaccines he’d be unable to leave his homeland of Chile, and he hadn’t had them due to an unforeseen difficulty. The ordering of parcels to Puerto Williams, one of the planet’s remotest places, is an exercise in optimism or at least in patience. And this applied to the vaccines as much as anything else, awaited by vets since Zibby was a baby. These still hadn’t appeared on the day of our departure.
Since we bought our boat going on six months ago, it hasn’t moved from an inlet of the Puerto Williams bay, thanks to engine troubles of which our readers are aware. Or rather it hadn’t until recently. Thankfully we became mobile shortly before the temporary import permit’s expiry, enabling us to fulfil the requirement of re-entering the country. More detail in earlier updates. The standard solution is a visit to Argentina’s Ushuaia, 45 km distant on the Beagle Channel’s other side.
Back in January, I wrote that we were about to buy our then-derelict boat to start our sailing journey. Four months later, the boat’s looking a lot better, though the sailing remains in the future. We’ll be forced to make our first excursion shortly, when our vessel’s import permit expires, which will require that it reenter Chile. So we’ll visit Argentina on the Beagle Channel’s opposite side.
‘I wouldn’t buy it in that state,’ was the conclusion of the friend whom we’d asked to check out our prospective boat while deciding whether to travel down here. On the basis of his photos, and also his thorough written survey, we differed from this sufficiently to make the journey. We doubted we could afford any boat in any better state. But we arrived in Puerto Williams a bit apprehensively.
S/Y SPACE ODDITY 