April 5, 2007
Clark April 5th, 2007
April 5, 2007
52º40′ South, 73º46′ West
Puerto Profundo
The kink worked and I finally got out of purgatory.
I had anchors up and got under way at the very first light, and it was a good thing because I just made my nineteen miles when I got shut down by thirty knot headwinds. At the same time the Armada announced that in the Boca Occidental it was back up to fifty, gusting to eighty.
What a horrible place for weather. There is an Armada station on one of the Islas Evangelistas, in the Boca Occidental, and apparently the weather is so consistently nasty that they have real problems supplying the post and exchanging personnel. They just can’t get boats out there. I’d rather round the Horn a dozen times than sail in this mess. At least at the Horn you’ve got some sea room; in the Boca Occidental there are boneyards at every turn.
I’m tied into another very narrow caleta, and this time Condesa didn’t behave so well while I was tying the shore lines to the trees. She did a little cliffside gardening with her starboard spreaders, but no damage done. Actually the sides of the fjords are so overhung with moss, and the water is so deep, that there’s really no harm in bouncing off the sides, just a lot of leaves and twigs all over the decks.
Ahhh, to get on land and walk around, to stomp on moss mounds and scramble over rocks. I feel like a new man.
I thought I’d have more stamina for waiting out a storm, given that I’ve lived on this boat for eight years and spent a lot of time sitting here anyway. I was climbing the walls in less than three days. Going outside the cockpit actually hurt with the rain and spray being driven so hard, not to mention the cold, so I really was stuck in just the main cabin. And I guess the rocking and the sound of a tempest outside aren’t exactly relaxing.
The progress is a little disappointing. Actually I read that a week is about the average time to get through the worst of the Boca Occidental. Most people just get stuck in Puerto Angosto the whole time, but I pecked away at the distance using little weather windows and spread my stuckness over a few different anchorages. It’s more of the same in the Canal Smyth, but at least it isn’t open to the Pacific swell. That is, it’s not dangerous, just slow going in a headwind, and motoring into a headwind burns a lot of precious fuel for not a lot of ground gained.
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