April 8, 2007
Clark April 8th, 2007
April 8, 2007
Puerto Mayne
51º18′ South, 74º04′ West
I’ve been having a terrible time keeping up with my position reports with the Armada.
I’m really in No Man’s Land now, so VHF is useless and the only hope is the HF radio. At 8AM and 8PM, the designated check in times, Puerto Montt Radio comes on the air and about fifty fishing boats give their positions in a fast, intimidating, truncated, vernacular Spanish, and I consider myself a fluent Spanish speaker. The only reasonable thing to do is to let them all finish, then those of us with training wheels can give it a shot. The propagation is horrible too, so my data ends up being relayed by some fishing boat. Whether the correct data ever arrives, I cannot say.
Sitting here listening to all this for half an hour, I pulled out a chart and started loosely plotting all the positions of the boats checking in. Conclusion: I am on my own. There is not a living human being within 100 miles of me, and this 100 miles, instead of being open ocean, is a meandering labyrinth so complex and intricate as to be mind boggling. Any given location is like the innermost Russian doll: a caleta within a seno within a passage within a channel within a strait within the vast galaxy that is the Patagonian channels.
Back in the Straits of Magellan, supposedly one of the world’s busy shipping routes, I would see a boat every day or two. Now that I’m in the thick of the channels, eh gads. To the best of my knowledge there is a German boat called Just Do It that is a couple hundred miles north of me. The boats behind me, the Belgians and another German, are still in Fuegian waters. There may be a fishing boat somewhere around here, but I doubt it. Most of them are offshore. If you want solitude, this is the place for it. If you ever get worried about too many people in the world and no place being left that’s wild, come on down.
I’m stuck in port again waiting for weather. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just being a wimp, but battling against thirty knot headwinds burns too much fuel and batters the boat too much. The prudent thing is to sit here and wait for improvement, but how long must I wait? I squeezed out 18 miles between the legendary Caleta Condesa and here, but I took a good pasting. The forecast just never looks any better.
At least here in Puerto Mayne I can take the dinghy ashore for my daily constitutional.
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